Cisco – How to recover the username and password for a Cisco 2500

On the Cisco 2960-S, the default credentials are cisco/cisco. These get deleted after the first time you login to the switch. There shouldn't be any access control on the console, unless the express setup puts it in there.

Now, if you set the virtual terminal password, then it probably just set a password on the line vty block, this should let you in with Telnet without needing a username. Once you get in to the switch with telnet you can run sh run | inc username. This will tell you what the username is set as, and probably the password if you don't have the password-encryption service on.

If this fails to work, then you will have to do a password recovery on the switch.

Run this command in config mode:

username user1 privilege 0 password NewPasswordForUser

That will change their password to NewPasswordForUser

EDIT: I should mention that it is recommended to use secret instead of password for increased security on the device. i.e.:

username user1 privilege 0 secret NewPasswordForUser

Though you can't switch from password to secret without removing the user or you'll get this error:

ERROR: Can not have both a user password and a user secret.

To make the change you'll want to remove the user:

no username user1

Then readd with a secret instead:

username user1 privilege 0 secret NewPasswordForUser