Cisco Cisco IPS 4255 Sensor

To recover the password on appliances, follow these steps:

Reboot the appliance.

The following menu appears:

GNU GRUB version 0.94 (632K lower / 523264K upper memory)

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0: Cisco IPS

1: Cisco IPS Recovery

2: Cisco IPS Clear Password (cisco)

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    Use the ^ and v keys to select which entry is highlighted.

    Press enter to boot the selected OS, 'e' to edit the

    Commands before booting, or 'c' for a command-line.

    Highlighted entry is 0:

Press any key to pause the boot process.

Choose 

. The password is reset to cisco. You can change the 

password the next time you log into the CLI.

For more information on connecting an appliance to a terminal server, refer to 

For the IPS 4240 and the IPS 4255 you can use the ROMMON to recover the password. To access the 
ROMMON CLI, reboot the sensor from a terminal server or direct connection and interrupt the boot 
process.

After recovering the password, you must reset the confreg to 0, otherwise, when you try to upgrade the 
sensor, the upgrade fails because when the sensor reboots, it goes to password recovery (confreg 0x7) 
rather than to the upgrade option. 

To recover the password using the ROMMON CLI, follow these steps:

Reboot the appliance.

To interrupt the boot process, press ESC or Control-R (terminal server) or send a BREAK command 
(direct connection).

The boot code either pauses for 10 seconds or displays something similar to one of the following:

Evaluating boot options

Use BREAK or ESC to interrupt boot

Enter the following commands to reset the password.