Nexsan SATABeast Password Reset via Serial Interface

I set a colleague of mine the task of updating our Nexsan storage devices with randomly generated administrator passwords as part of our regular security review. For whatever reason one of the Nexsan SATABeast units decided on next logon that it didn’t like the new password we had set, nor would it accept the old one. This was rather amusing for me, though not so much for my colleague. We packed our bags and set off to the datacenter where this unit is hosted as everything is remote to our office. Once there we had even more fun on discovering that these units don’t take a standard DB9 serial connection but require a mini-DIN connector. Then we realised our modern laptops don’t have serial connections and as we primarily run blade servers we didn’t have an older server we could plug into either…

Eventually we overcame all these little hurdles and managed to get a serial connection and in this post I will quickly cover the steps to reset the administrator password. Please note these steps worked on our SATABeast2 device and I cannot speak for any other models as (so far) none of our newer Nexsan arrays been in this situation.


I’m going to assume you have a working serial connection to the Nexsan – in my example below I used PuTTy which is freely available. Hopefully the screenshots will display OK – Nexsan use an interesting colour palette for their interface.

The system presents us with a menu screen and a few options. We will enter the ‘Alarms and security’ menu.

Nexsan Serial Interface Administrator Password Reset - System Information Screen

Next we need to move down to the ‘Set GUI ‘ADMIN’ login password’ option – if you need to change the user password you can also do that from this menu.

Nexsan Serial Interface Administrator Password Reset - System Admin Menu

The system will now present us with a prompt to enter a new password.

Nexsan Serial Interface Administrator Password Reset - Enter GUI Admin Password

Nexsan Serial Interface Administrator Password Reset - Enter GUI Admin Password

Finally all being well you should receive confirmation in the blue bar that the password has been updated.

 

 

As you can see the process is straightforward – our issues purely revolved around having the right cables to connect to the unit. We’ve taken care of that by ordering enough for all of the senior engineers plus serial to USB adaptors for our laptops.

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