AP8853 - Sporadic bad username password

[Benji_apc]

He have got a bunch of new AP8853 rack metered PDUs and are having login issues with all eight of them.

Most of the time we are getting an bad username or password dialog, the entered credentials are definitely correct.

Even with telnet / ssh the connection will not be successful.

Sometimes it works some time later, we even noticed than one computer can access it at one time while the other can't.

Is there some kind of firewall enabled that may block certain machines from logging in?

Anyone seeing this problem before?

Restarting the management interface doesn't really help.

Firmware is the latest 6.4.6.

We're not seeing any of these issues on our SMART-UPS devices with AP9630 cards which are still on 6.4.0.

Hope someone can help me out, these metered rack PDUs are driving me crazy.

[BillP]

Hi Benjamin,

Are you using local credentials (stored on the PDU) or RADIUS authentication?

Do your passwords contain spaces and special characters? (I realize in this day and age most people are using these but just want to check)

There is a firewall on the system but it is completely disabled by default. And, even if you enable it, the default firewall policy is to allow all traffic through. Lastly, even with the firewall enabled, it doesn't have any capability to let you as far as the log in page to receive invalid username/password messages. I'd assume it'd block you completely where you wouldn't be able to tell if something is at the IP address between the different networking protocols it supports allowing/blocking.

I am not aware of any issues of this but if you could give me a sample username/password you are seeing the problem with (one similar to what you use or a dummy one you can make the problem happen with), maybe I could look into it a bit more or try to replicate it.

[Benji_apc]

Hi Angela,

We are using local credentials. Default apc account has been disabled.
Password contains several special characters, username should not cause any problems though.

I'll check on Monday if changing the password does help.
We're using the same password on our AP9630 devices which are running 6.4.0 and don't see any problem.
Was there any change which might cause this since then?

[BillP]

There was a change I was aware of but it was only specific to RADIUS credentials longer than a certain length. Since you're using local credentials, it should not apply. And I asked about spaces because I've seen an issue with that before where after the space gets cut off in certain situations but we had resolved that.

Here is a knowledge base article you could double check for some further info -> http://www.apc.com/us/en/faqs/FA156106

[Benji_apc]

Hi Angela,

thanks for the link.

What does this reference exactly?
"Global restriction on < > "" characters (except for username and password field)"

In which fields is this prohibited then for example?

[BillP]

I believe it refers to any user input field except username and password field. So basically any field that you can write text or numbers.

[Benji_apc · Accepted solution]

I've re-enabled the apc user with the serial cable and was able to log in.

I can't see the issue anymore after setting the password for our custom user once again. (Did not change it, just reset it to what it should be)