Lost admin password; email server cahnge; can't change email settings to get password

Got an odd little problem. I set up the Express edition for testing. We are going to purchase the Pro version, but I'd like to keep the express version for my own domain.

However, subsequent to setting up the email options, we moved our mail server to a new product, and the username for the account that CS is using for mail has changed.

I don't remember the admin password, and when I requested the password, CS can't log in to the email server due to the change in user name formatting (the name is the same, but it is using a slightly different convention, without the @ sign in the username).

Is there any way to recover the admin password, or barring that, to start over clean without a full uninstall/reinstall?

Ron Wodaski

I managed to solve this on my own. I created a DSN for the SQL Server Community Server database, then wrote a web page to display the EmailBody fields from the cs_EmailQueue table. This allowed me to read the new username/password combo. I can now log in as admin and make the changes required to get email working again.

 Ron Wodaski

The other option is to update the password field directly. Since passwords are hashed and salted, there is no way to directly recover the password.

You could have executed:
update aspnet_membership set password='thepassword', passwordformat= 0 where userid = 'theuserid'

You will need to find the userid from the aspnet_users table.

In the above SQL, you are setting the password to be stored as plain text. Once you login, you should update your password again which will then cause it to be resalted/hashed.

HTH,
Scott

My technique is to create a new user - and copy the salt/password over to the lost one in SQL - then its known.

Hi,

how do i reset the admin password?

Mazaffar.

Scott Watermasysk:

The other option is to update the password field directly. Since passwords are hashed and salted, there is no way to directly recover the password.

You could have executed:
update aspnet_membership set password='thepassword', passwordformat= 0 where userid = 'theuserid'

You will need to find the userid from the aspnet_users table.

In the above SQL, you are setting the password to be stored as plain text. Once you login, you should update your password again which will then cause it to be resalted/hashed.

HTH,
Scott

Scott,

Are you aware that this doesn't work in CS2007 sp2 anymore? The password is not encrypted again after setting the password format to 0