Rocky Linux 9.2 Blue Onyx: Forgot Login Credentials? (Here are the Default Options)

Hey everyone, I’ve been working on setting up a Rocky Linux 9.2 Blue Onyx server, and I just wanted to share my experience with the default login credentials. It wasn’t as straightforward as I thought it would be, so hopefully, this helps someone out there.

First off, I downloaded the Blue Onyx image and got it installed on my server. It’s a pretty neat distribution, based on RHEL9, and it comes with a nice-looking GUI called Elmer. After the installation was done, I was eager to log in and start tinkering.

I tried the usual “root” as the username and, well, I assumed there would be a default password like “password” or something similar. Nope, that didn’t work. I was locked out! My first thought was, “Okay, did I mess up during the installation? Did I miss a step where I was supposed to set the root password?”

• So, I went back to the installation guide for Blue Onyx, read through it again, and couldn’t find anything about default credentials. It just mentioned that the root user is there and that SSH password login is disabled for root by default. That’s a good security practice, but it didn’t help me get in.

• Next, I hit up some forums and online communities. I found a few posts where people had similar issues, but no clear answers. Some folks suggested that there might be a default password in some configuration file somewhere, but nobody knew for sure where or what.

Then, I stumbled upon a guide that explained how to reset the root password on Rocky Linux 9. I thought to myself, I can use that since Blue Onyx is based on RHEL9. I rebooted the server, interrupted the boot process, and added “*” to the end of the kernel command line. This dropped me into an emergency shell.

In the emergency shell, I had to remount the root file system with read-write permissions using mount -o remount,rw /sysroot. Then, I used chroot /sysroot to enter the system. From there, I could finally change the root password with the good old passwd command. I entered a new password, and then I had to relabel the SELinux context on the whole system to make sure everything would work smoothly after the reboot. For that I typed touch /.autorelabel in the root directory, then exit twice, reboot.

After the server rebooted, I was finally able to log in as root using the new password I set. It felt like a huge win after all that struggle!

Later, I realized that the default setting for SSH is to prohibit password authentication for the root user. It’s specified as “prohibit-password” in the SSH configuration. I decided to change that to allow password login for root, but only temporarily for some initial setup tasks. I edited the sshd_config file (or you can create a separate .conf file under /etc/ssh/sshd_config.d), changed PermitRootLogin to yes, and restarted the SSH service.

Moral of the story:

Default credentials can be tricky, and security practices like disabling root SSH password login are important. But if you’re ever in a situation like mine, remember that you can reset the root password by booting into emergency mode, remounting the file system, and using the passwd command. And don’t forget to adjust the SSH settings if you need to temporarily allow root login with a password, but always switch it back afterward for better security!

I hope this little adventure of mine saves someone some time and frustration. Happy Linux-ing, folks!