Resetting The Password of the Root User

  • The TufinOS 3 operating system reached EOL (end of life) on June 30, 2024 and is no longer supported. The final version - TufinOS 3.110 - was released in December 2023. If you are still running on TufinOS 3, we recommend upgrading to TufinOS 4 to get the benefit of the latest security patches.

  • TufinOS 4 does not support TOS releases earlier than R22-2 so if you are still running R22-1 or earlier, you must upgrade TOS before upgrading to TufinOS 4.

In TufinOS administration privileges are handled through the tufin-admin user. However, there are also instances where the root user is going to be required, such as:

  • Recovering the password for the tufin-admin user

  • Entering Rescue Mode (only relevant for TufinOS 3.100).

If faced with such a situation, you are going to need to enter rd.break mode and reset the password of the root user.

This procedure is also relevant for non-TufinOS Linux systems.

Reset The Password of The Root User

  1. Reboot your operating system.

  2. While rebooting, press e to edit the first boot entry - the kernel name autogenerated by the operating system.

    If you upgrade to TufinOS 3.100 from an older version, the grub menu displays three boot entries. Edit the first entry.

  3. From the grub options, find the line that starts with linux16.. Enter rd.break without quotes at the end of this line.

    If you are connected with a serial console cable, you must remove console=tty1 before adding rd.break.

  4. Press Ctrl+X to reboot.

    The root file system is mounted in read only mode to /sysroot and must be remounted with read/write (rw) permissions.

  5. Enter mount -o remount,rw /sysroot.

    After remounting, you are going to need to switch to chroot jail so that that /sysroot is used as the root of the file system. This is required so that any further commands you run will be in regards to /sysroot.

  6. Enter chroot /sysroot.

  7. To reset the password of the root user, enter passwd.

  8. Enter the new password and then retype it.

    You have updated the password of the root user.

  9. To exit the chroot jail environment and reboot the system, enter Exit twice.

    Once the system reboots, you will be able to access the root user account with the password you created.