[time-nuts] Spectracom 9383: How to do password reset

[Bruce Lane]

 Â Â Â  I'm posting this in the hopes of helping anyone else who may get 
hold of a Spectracom 9300 series NetClock, and is locked out of 
configuration by the previous owner's password. I just went through this 
situation with my recently-acquired Spectracom 9383. Considering 
Spectracom's merger with Orolia, and the apparent requirement of a 
(expensive, probably) service contract to render tech help, we're pretty 
much on our collective own with these units.

 Â Â Â  The 9383 has a single-board PC at its core (in my case, an 
Advantech SOM-4455) which runs a stripped-down version of 32-bit Linux. 
I couldn't determine the exact variant (the system banner read 'Vile 
Linux,' of all things), but the fact it was running on the ext3 file 
system gave me some clue as to its age and 32-bitness.

 Â Â Â  So -- You're locked out of configuring the thing, default passwords 
inoperative. No problem! Here's what you'll need to get around it.

  * A spare computer, running whatever Linux you can find which can
    handle 32-bit environments (I used Debian 11).

  * Root access on said computer.

  * A USB-to-CompactFlash (CF) card adapter which your Linux load is
    happy with.

  * Comfort with the linux CLI, including mount/unmount disks and doing
    chroot operations.

 Â Â Â  Take the top cover off your NetClock by removing ALL the small 
flat-head screws on top. One or more may be hidden under calibration 
seals; Don't worry about it, just take them out. A #2 Phillips works 
great. Also, note the cover may be slightly sticky coming up due to 
heat-sink goo between it and the SBC's CPU. Just rotate/wiggle the cover 
a bit and it should pop free.

 Â Â Â  You should see, on the main PC board, a CF card installed slightly 
to the left of center (looking at it from the front). This card contains 
the unit's entire OS and configuration settings. Release the wire clamp 
holding the card in and slide it out.

 Â Â Â  A side-note: You may also notice a standard female VGA D-sub 
connector and PS/2 Keyboard mini-DIN connector on the main board. You 
can, if you want, hook up an appropriate keyboard and LCD display to 
these ports, giving you a local console into the embedded PC and (once 
you finish resetting the passwords) full control over the OS.

 Â Â Â  Back to password-tweaking: Boot up your second Linux box and log in 
as root (I don't recommend trying to do the mods using sudo). Plug the 
CF card into the USB/CF Reader, and plug the whole thing into your 
second system. Note what device name it comes up with on the screen, as 
you will need this in a minute. I will assume, for example, it turns out 
to be sdb.

 Â Â Â  On your spare system, create a directory wherever is most 
convenient for you to work with. Personally, I simply stayed in my home 
directory and created a subdirectory called 'spec.' I'll assume, as an 
example, that you're doing it the same way.

 Â Â Â  Mount the CF card to your newly-created directory with the command: 
mount /dev/sdb1 ./spec

     Next, to make sure it took, do ls -l (or ll) ./spec         You 
should see a pretty normal-looking Linux disk directory tree.

 Â Â Â  Now the fun part. Type the following commands (adjust the path of 
your mount point directory accordingly):

 Â Â Â  mount --bind /dev ./spec/dev
 Â Â Â  mount --bind /dev/pts ./spec/dev/pts
 Â Â Â  mount --bind /proc ./spec/proc
 Â Â Â  mount --bind /sys ./spec/sys
 Â Â Â  chroot ./spec

 Â Â Â  Presto! You should now have a root-based command prompt from the OS 
load on the CF card, just as if you'd been able to get into it originally.

 Â Â Â  Now, use the regular Linux passwd command to reset the password for 
the user 'admin' to whatever you want. In my case, I initially reset it 
to Spectracom factory default (admin123).

 Â Â Â  You can even, if you want, reset the password for the user ID's 
'root' or 'factory' to anything you want. In my case, I re-did root as 
well, to give me a back door in case I got curious about what else might 
be in there in the future. ;-)

 Â Â Â  Next step: Back out of the chroot function (almost) the same way 
you came in.

 Â Â Â  umount ./spec/sys
 Â Â Â  umount ./spec/proc
 Â Â Â  umount ./spec/dev/pts
 Â Â Â  umount ./spec/dev

 Â Â Â  Unplug the CF card, reinstall it in the NetClock, connect (if you 
want) your spare monitor and keyboard to the matching ports on the 
mainboard, and power the unit back up. It may go into 'Updating 
Firmware' mode for a few minutes, as it reprograms the FPGA's on the 
main board with whatever changes it needs to do.

 Â Â Â  At this point, you should be able to log in to either the built-in 
web interface or the CLI serial port as user 'admin' with whatever 
password you assigned. You should also be able to log in as any other 
user you reset the password for. If so, you're done! Button it up and 
put it back in service.

 Â Â Â  I'll try to answer whatever questions may come my way about this. 
Happy tweaking.

-- 
Bruce Lane, ARS KC7GR
kyrrin at bluefeathertech.com
"Quando Omni Flunkus Moritati" (Red Green)