One of the popular open source control panels for Linux hosting is ISPConfig.

Also, it allows managing of multiple servers simultaneously via admin panel.

However, users may forget their ISPConfig admin password or they need to change access details for security reasons.

That’s where the ISPConfig reset admin password option comes handy.

At Bobcares, we often get requests from our customers to reset ISPConfig admin password as part of our Server Management Services.

Today, we’ll see how our Support Engineers change ISPConfig admin password and fix related errors.

How we change the ISPConfig admin password

The wrong username and incorrect password may not allow to login to the admin panel. In addition, It may show the following error in a login page while trying to login with incorrect credentials.

Therefore, our Support Engineers reset the admin password with the following steps.

1. Initially, we login as a root user and find the ISPConfig config file that contains MySQL information.

cat /usr/local/ispconfig/server/lib/mysql_clientdb.conf

The result looks like,

$conf['db_database'] = 'dbispconfig';

$clientdb_host = ‘localhost’;

$clientdb_user = ‘root’;

$clientdb_password = ‘Password’;

2. After that, we log into the MySQL server from the command line with the information extracted from mysql_clientdb.conf. This helps us to confirm that the password actually works.

mysql -h localhost -p dbispconfig

3. Then we set this password in the MySQL database by running:

UPDATE sys_user SET passwort = md5('YourNewPassword') WHERE username = 'admin';
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
quit;

5. Finally, restart MySQL service.

How we fixed errors related to ISPConfig reset admin password

From our experience in managing servers, we’ve seen customers facing problems when resetting ISPConfig administrator password. Let’s take a closer look at how our Support Engineers fixed these problems.

1. Wrong username and password

Recently, one of our customers reported a problem regarding ISPConfig admin password. Clearly, he was getting an error while login to ISPConfig control panel for the first time. The error said,

"The default ISPConfig Username is: admin
and the Password is: admin
Warning: This is a security risk. Please change the default password after your login"

Therefore our Support Engineers took the following steps to solve the issue

1. We login into the server as a root user and MySQL too.

2. Then we run the below command to reset the admin password to a temporary one.

mysql -u root -p

use dbispconfig;

UPDATE sys_user SET passwort = md5('Admin123') WHERE username = 'admin';

quit;

Now, the customer could log in to ISPConfig control panel without any errors. Then he was able to reset the password to a strong one that satisfies the security criteria.

2. Improper MySQL settings

Similarly, users can get error such as Error Username or Password wrong due to improper settings in the MySQL server.

For example, another customer had a problem in ISPConfig login after resetting the MySQL root account password. Moreover, he couldn’t log in to ISPConfig’s web interface.

On checking, we found that the password in config.inc.php located at /usr/local/ispconfig/server/lib/ and MySQL password was incorrect. For the logins to work, they should be the same.

So, we reset the MySQL ISPConfig account password with a password from the file config.inc.php

mysql> update User set Password = PASSWORD('Qwerty12334!@#') WHERE User = 'ispconfig'

That’s fixed the problem and the panel was accessible again.

[Having trouble while changing ISPConfig administrator password? We’ll fix it for you.]

Conclusion

In short, ISPConfig reset admin password allow the customers to reset their password when the password is forgotten or has a need to enhance the password security. Today, we saw how our Support Engineers changed ISPConfig admin password and fixed related errors.