Backup with unknown admin password
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Hi,
I have 'inherited' a pfSense firewall in the school of which I have recently become IT-admin.
I would like to change a few things, such as adding a VPN tunnel so I can do my job from home (useful in general, but especially in these times)
But my problem is, the previous IT-admin left all the network management to an external company, and doesn't even have a login with admin privileges to our firewall. When I log in through the "IT" account he provided I can't even see what other users there are. And the external company also closed shop a few months ago, so we can't reach anyone to recover our pfSense admin login.I was planning on just wiping and clean installing the entire firewall, since I am pretty certain we don't do anything fancy such as subnets or even any especially strict firewall filtering, and as far as I can tell all devices just connect through DHCP.
But, just in case a complete wipe would break the network, would I be able to reinstall a backup of the firewall as it is currently without knowing the admin password?
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Yes, as long as the config itself is not encrypted you can restore it. Of course it will lock you out again!
You can probably recover the admin account though as long as you have physical access to the console:
https://docs.netgate.com/pfsense/en/latest/troubleshooting/locked-out.htmlYou really don't want to be using a config you have no control over. Especially if it was remotely administered by some other company, they presumably had some external access that should be removed.
Steve
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@stephenw10
I hadn't even considered there would be a way to reset the password, that should make this a lot easier :)
Thanks for the info!
