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Fix errors in commands in Sun ILOM

admin — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 20:17:58 +0000

There has been more than one instance when the Sun ILOM was not responsive to commands or were throwing errors. For instance, when you try to run the following command to reset the ILOM

-> reset /SP
Are you sure you want to reset /SP (y/n)? y
Performing hard reset on /SP failed
reset: No such inventory

or when you try to reset the ILOM password, you may get the error “Set: No such object value”
To resolve the problem, you can actually logon to the ILOM as the user “sunservice” with the password of the ILOM root user and then reboot the ILOM (equivalne to “reset /SP”) with the command “reboot” as follows. Clearly as you can see from this warning SUN doesn’t recommend it so use it at your own risk:

login as: sunservice
Using keyboard-interactive authentication.
Password:

Copyright 2007 Sun Microsystems, Inc. All rights reserved.
Use is subject to license terms.

WARNING: The “sunservice” account is provided solely to allow
Sun Services to perform diagnosis and recovery tasks. Customer use of
the “sunservice” account may interfere with the correct operation of
ILOM and is not supported other than to perform recovery procedures as
documented by Sun Microsystems. Normal ILOM operations should always be
performed using the root account. Further usage of the “sunservice”
account implies your agreement with these terms.
[(flash)root@SERV-ILOM:~]# reboot
/sbin/reboot

How to recover/reset root password in Sun solaris (x86)

admin — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 17:56:51 +0000

I discussed here about resetting the password on Sun Solaris Operating system in SPARC platform. While the procedure is almost the same wherein you boot with the CD into single user mode and mount the root partition, here we discuss the procedure to reset the password for the root user on the x86 platform.

It is recommeded that the security for the physical access to the server is restricted so as to ensure that there is no unauthorized access and anyone who follows this routine is an authorized personnel.

Boot the server with a Sun Solaris Operating System CD (I’m using a Solaris 10 CD but doesn’t matter really) or a network boot with a JumpStart server. Change the Boot order accordingly in your x86 system and start the server and launch a single user mode (No Password).

In Solaris 10, you have the default Fail Safe boot option in the Boot Loader. With this you do not need a CD or JumpStart server as selecting it will launch the Single-User shell. I haven’t used the early Solaris versions on an x86 system so if anyone knows it is availabe then please post your comments.

When you boot from the CD, select the option for the Sigle-user mode (Option 6 on Solaris 10 CD)

This will look for the currently installed Solaris OS on your system and prompts a Yes/No question to mount the Root filesystem as a Read/Write file system onto /a.

Select yes to mount the root file system (/dev/dsk/c0t0d0s0 here) on /a. If you select No, no harm as you still can mount it manually using:

solaris# mount /dev/dsk/c0t0d0s0 /a

NOTE: /a is a temporary mount point that is available when you boot from CD or a JumpStart server

Now, with the root file system mounted on /a. All you need to do is to edit the shadow file and remove the encrypted password for root.

solaris# vi /a/etc/shadow

Now, exit the mounted filesysten, unmount the root filesystem and reboot the system to single-user mode booting of the disk.

solaris# cd /

solaris# umount /a

solaris# init s

This should boot of the disk and take you to the single-user mode. Press enter at the prompt to enter a password for root.

This should allow you to login to the system. Once in, set the password and change to multi-user mode.

NOTE: Single-User mode is only to ensure that the root user without password is not exposed to others if started in multi-user mode before being set with a new password.

solaris# passwd root

solaris# reboot

This should do. You should now be able to logon as root with the new password.

How to recover/reset root password in Sun solaris (SPARC)

admin — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 17:42:00 +0000

There is every little chance that one loses or rather forgets the root password of his Sun Solaris servers. In the event, this happens, there is a way out of it. Well the way and infact the only way is to reset the password as there is no way to recover it. Recovering/restting the password involves booting the server in Single User mode and mounting the root file system.

Ofcourse, it is recommeded that the security for the physical access to the server is restricted so as to ensure that there is no unauthorized access and anyone who follows this routine is an authorized personnel.

Boot the server with a Sun Solaris Operating System CD (I’m using a Solaris 10 CD but doesn’t matter really) or a network boot with a JumpStart server from the OBP OK prompt.

OK boot cdrom -s

OK boot net -s

This will boot the server from the CD or Jumpstart server and launch a single user mode (No Password).

Mount the root file system (assume /dev/dsk/c0t0d0s0 here) onto /a