Recovering Lost Password for IBM DS3400

Months ago, we planned to add some capacity to our SAN storage system, a dual-controllers IBM DS3400, by ordering some additional SAS drives. After the drives arrived, one big problem came up: I forgot the administrative password to login to the DS3400 controllers. This actually showed that this disk system was built to last as I never had any problems and therefore had no need to login to this system since I set it up in 2008.

So, I did extensive googling and came to the conclusion that to recover (or reset) the password, I either needed to connect directly to the storage system through serial port, or to contact the IBM technical support. I was actually hoping that using in-band management (instead of out-of-band management) would increase my privilege and allow me to factory-reset the system. Alas, it did not work out. Meaning that my options were limited to those two above.

The first option, connecting directly using serial port, would have been very easy if not for the uncommon PS/2 style of COM port that the DS3400 controllers employed. This required me to purchase a PS/2-style serial null modem cable, a Service Cable part number 13N1932 in IBM catalog. However, it was quite costly (USD 150+ in the internet, so I would probably get twice that price in my country, Indonesia). This was more that my technical assistant’s monthly salary. And it might take some time from the ordering until receiving the cable anyway. So I ruled out this option.

I also ruled out the second option, since the 3-year onsite warranty of our DS3400 has expired and so the hourly cost of the technical support was more than the price of the service cable, after I called the technical support for the quotation.

In the meantime, I was still extensively googling for the information of resetting the password and the diagram of the PS/2-style null modem cable, using any possible combination of keyword that I could think of (for some info, the IBM DS3400 was based on LSI Engenio system). After weeks of googling (not that I did the search everyday, as I had other things to do, such as lecturing, etc), I found a posting (#6151), in Russian AIX forum, that gave a clue about the pinouts of the cable. Thanks to Google Translate, I was able to obtain the pinout scheme of the cable and asked my trusted technical assistant to create the intended cable (after trying twice, probably because something lost in the Google translation),.

DISCLAIMER. Please contact IBM technical support to address this kind of problem, unless you know exactly what you are going to do. The technical staff are very knowledgeable, and will provide excellent support. By performing the procedure yourself, you risk losing of the data in your array, or rendering your array inaccessible.

Ok, after the disclaimer above, following is the schematic pinout diagram of the PS/2 serial null modem cable necessary to connect to the DS3400 PS/2 serial console that I used (I promise I’d draw a nice diagram, but for now this should do).

PS/2 <> COM
1 <> 3
2 <> 2
3 <> 5
4 <> 4
5 <> 5

Armed with the cable, and following the information from this link using infiniti as the password, I was able to reset the password, add the drives, and upgrade the firmware (from 6.xx to 7.xx). Perfect.

Other combinations of default password worth to try are (depending on the firmware and NVSRAM):

shellUsr
wy3oo&w4

shellUsr
infiniti

shellUsr
y2llojp