Oracle Sun Microsystems T2000 (and similar) ALOM/SC Password Recovery

ServerSo today, I am working on a nice little Sun Microsystems T2000 server. It was purchased used by my customer and I am setting it up. Right away I ran into a snag, naturally, because I didn’t have the ALOM (Advanced Lights Out Management) or SC (System Controller) password for this machine go to this web-site. According to the person that sold the server, it was pulled from a working environment, the drives were wiped and it was sent out to be sold. This means that I had no way to get the old password from anyone, therefore I had to get past it myself.

Let me lay it out for you. In this situation you can’t really recover the password or see what it currently is. The only option at this point is to go in and clear out or erase the ALOM NVRAM so that you can then get access and setup a new password. In order to do this, you will need to connect your laptop to the serial management port. You can do this with a laptop or PC or whatever but for the sake of this article I am going to just use laptop. You will also need access to the power cords, because you are going to have to physically cut the power to the server to get started. OK, ready? Got everything in order? OK, let’s begin.

Make sure you are already connected to the server via the serial management port on the back, and your favorite terminal software – I use SecureCRT myself, it’s the best I think. Once you are connected, and verify that you are because this won’t work if you aren’t, kill the power to the server by unplugging both of the power supplies. Once unplugged and you are sure that there is no longer any power going to the server, wait one minute and then plug the power back in. You need to be quick about this, as soon as you plug it in you need to hit the escape key on your laptop. You need to press the escape key before you see the following on the screen:

Return to Boot Monitor for Handshake

Assuming you press the escape key in time you probably will see the following response:

Return to Boot Monitor for Handshake ESC keypress detected.

Even if you don’t see that response, don’t worry, just wait a few seconds and as the ALOM goes into the “ALOM boot escape menu” you should see the following:

ALOM  Menu
e – Erase ALOM NVRAM.
m – Run POST Menu.
R – Reset ALOM.
r – Return to bootmon.
Your selection:

As I mentioned earlier, you cannot just recover the password, you have to erase the ALON NVRAM entirely taking it back to like it was new basically. From this menu, you choose ‘e’ to erase the NVRAM and then, once that is complete, you choose ‘r’ to resume the ALOM boot process. After the boot process finishes, you will automatically be logged in as the user ‘admin’ with no password and no permissions. The NVRAM settings will also be reset to the factory default, like when it was new. Any settings, naturally, including the ALOM network settings will be erased and will need to be setup again.

To set a password for the current user, ‘admin’, simply enter the command ‘password’ and it will prompt you for a new password for that user. Just a quick tip, when you are at the ‘SC’ or ‘System Controller’, the prompt will look like this ‘sc>’. And when you are at the ‘console’, the prompt will look like this ‘ok ‘. To get to the ‘console’ from the ‘SC’, simply type the command ‘console’, and to return to the ‘SC’ from the console, you can type the command ‘#.’ – yes, that is pound sign period, no space in between! You can type help to get help with commands while in either one.

I hope this article helps you without T2000 and related server adventures!! Thank you.

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