I’ve observed the following symptom when attempting to password default the iDRAC on multiple PowerEdge servers – iDRAC will reset but the password does not default back to “calvin” or whatever password is on the pull-out tab. Attempting to manually set the password back to calvin results in an error.
This seems to be due to a minimum password complexity requirement not being satisfied – and possibly dictated by branding set by the previous owner of the server. The solution is to temporarily set a password that does meet the minimum password requirements. Once set you can login to the iDRAC and change password requirement settings.
Enter the BIOS (F2) and go into the iDRAC settings:
Scroll down to user configuration and manually change the password. Be sure to use a sufficiently complex password so the password requirements are met.
Now login into the iDRAC. Click iDRAC Settings and then expand global user settings. Make sure the minimum password requirement score is set to 0, otherwise “calvin” could never possibly meet the requirement.
You can now expand local users and click EDIT for the root Administrator account. Manually change the password back to calvin.
The problem is resetting the iDRAC reverses these changes and you end up where you started.
The next step is to default the branding back to factory defaults instead of the custom branding.
What is branding and how do you tell if you have non-default branding? If you look at the startup splash screens you can see:
This is an R740xd2 yet the branding says ECSv3. This is branding from the previous owner and it’s possible there were some non default settings related to the passwords baked into the branding.
After rebranding back to factory defaults the splash screen looks normal:
Even though you can get into the iDRAC you should attempt to rebrand the server so iDRAC can be reset. Once rebranded the server will properly default the password settings along with everything else.
