Switched On Tech Design

Tag: password

  • Owncloud Nine: How to reset the admin password

    Well, about ten minutes after installing the new Owncloud Nine we found out that we had typo’d the admin password. Fortunately, it’s an easy fix. Run the following (this worked on Debian with a fresh Owncloud 9 install):

     

    cd /path/to/owncloud

    sudo -u webserveruser php occ user:resetpassword adminaccountname

     

    In our case the command was:

     

    cd /var/www/cloud

    sudo -u www-data php occ user:resetpassword admin

     

    It should prompt you for your password twice:

     

    Owncloud Nine - How to reset the admin password
    Owncloud Nine – How to reset the admin password

     

    Assuming there are no more typos, that’s all done!

  • Thunderbird and Google Apps or Gmail – wrong password message despite correct password being entered

    This is a frustrating issue – you have youreslf a shiny new Gmail or Google apps account, but for some reason when you try to add the account to Thunderbird it complains about your password being incorrect:

     

    Configuration could not be verified – is the user name or password wrong?

     

    After double checking that the password is indeed correct, the most common cause we have found for this is that IMAP is disabled in your gmail settings. Log into your gmail via a web browser and click on the gear in the top right, then select:

     

    Settings -> Forwarding and Pop/IMAP

     

    Once you are in the Forwarding and Pop/IMAP tab, scroll down until you see:

    IMAP Access

     

    Hopefully the radio button for Disable IMAP is selected. If so, select “Enable IMAP”, save your settings and try again. Hopefully that ends your frustrating login attempts!

  • How to reset a user password in Windows without knowing the original password

     

    Today we were asked how to reset a Windows user password (in this case the administrator account for a Windows Home Server 2011 install) without knowing the original password. The user had a logged-in Administrator session but had typo’d their password twice successfully during the install and was not keen on reinstalling then repeating the several hours of setup they had just completed.

     

    If this happens to you, open up a CMD window with Administrator privileges (in the WHS 2011 example the CMD window automatically has these) and type the following:

     

    net user [username] *

     

    In this case:

     

    net user administrator *

     

    You will be prompted to enter a new password without having to provide the existing password first. To get a list of the users on the system, you can run:

     

    net users

     

    Use this for good, not evil!

  • How to change a user’s password in Mediawiki

    If you have a wiki you may need to change a user’s password from time to time; you can do this from the back end quite easily. First, access mysql:

     

    mysql -u root -p

     

    Log in using your root password. Next, list your databases:

     

    show databases;

     

    On our test system this shows all of our databases like so:

     

    mysql> show databases;
    +——————–+
    | Database
    +——————–+
    | information_schema
    | mysql
    | performance_schema
    | press
    | test
    | wiki
    +——————–+
    6 rows in set (0.10 sec)

    Select your wiki’s database:

     

    USE wiki;

     

    Replace “wiki” in the above with your own database’s name.

     

    UPDATE user SET user_password = MD5(CONCAT(user_id, ‘-‘, MD5(‘newpasswordgoeshere’))) WHERE user_name = ‘usernameofuser’;

     

    If this is successful you should get the following:

     

    Query OK, 1 row affected (0.01 sec)
    Rows matched: 1  Changed: 1  Warnings: 0

     

    If something has gone wrong (e.g. a non-existent username) you will get the following instead:

     

    Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.03 sec)
    Rows matched: 0  Changed: 0  Warnings: 0

     

    All done! To leave mysql just type “exit”.