Cisco – How to change the password on a Cisco Catalyst 2960 switch

ciscocisco-catalystpasswordusers

I was given a username and a temporary password on a catalyst switch and I can't figure out how to change my password…

Upon googling, I found this but when I raise my privileges to 15 by typing enable 15 and then type

username gozulin {[1] opensesame} it says:

%invalid input detected at '^' marker

The marker is pointed at the first character after my username.

So, how do I do it?

EDIT: now I type

username gozulin password opensesame it says:

%invalid input detected at '^' marker

EDIT 2: Success!

The system is setup for (md5) encrypted passwords so the command I had to give after was:

username gozulin secret opensesame

Thank you all for your help!

Best Answer

The braces and brackets are just to tell you whether the option is required or not. You need to issue the command like so:

username gozulin password 0 opensesame

The 0 is because you are using an unencrypted password on the command line (and I hope they have service password-encryption enabled!) If you know the encrypted version of your password (normally not, that tends to be used for auto configs) you would set type to 1.

Related Solutions

Ssh – How to automate SSH login with password

Don't use a password. Generate a passphrase-less SSH key and push it to your VM.

If you already have an SSH key, you can skip this step… Just hit Enter for the key and both passphrases:

$ ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 2048
Generating public/private rsa key pair.
Enter file in which to save the key (/home/username/.ssh/id_rsa):
Enter passphrase (empty for no passphrase):
Enter same passphrase again:
Your identification has been saved in /home/username/.ssh/id_rsa.
Your public key has been saved in /home/username/.ssh/id_rsa.pub.

Copy your keys to the target server:

$ ssh-copy-id id@server
id@server's password:

Now try logging into the machine, with ssh 'id@server', and check-in:

.ssh/authorized_keys

Note: If you don't have .ssh dir and authorized_keys file, you need to create it first

to make sure we haven’t added extra keys that you weren’t expecting.

Finally, check to log in…

$ ssh id@server

id@server:~$

You may also want to look into using ssh-agent if you want to try keeping your keys protected with a passphrase.

Cisco – What characters are illegal in Cisco IOS username secret passwords

Each type of password is case sensitive, can contain from 1 to 25 uppercase and lowercase alphanumeric characters, and can start with a numeral. Spaces are also valid password characters; for example, "two words" is a valid password. Leading spaces are ignored, but trailing spaces are recognized.

Taken from: http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/ios/preface/usingios.html

According to the documentation there aren't that many restrictions for creating passwords. Does a show login create a log for failed logon attempts? Is it possible that users are typing the passwords incorrectly?

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Ssh – How to automate SSH login with password

Cisco – What characters are illegal in Cisco IOS username secret passwords

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