Thursday, August 2, 2012

Lost VSS Admin Password. No Problem

It's not new in IT environment, hearing from VSS Admin, Oops I don't remember the Admin password or I thought you guys migrated to Github etc., Well if that doesn't happened to you you are lucky, in my case I am not. I wanted to add some useres but couldn't be able to do it because no one knows the Admin Password. I was the only one using VSS, however it doesn't ask for the password since the VSS user name is same as my network user account. I thought I can try the same for Admin as well.
So I created account called "Admin" (Not Administrator) on my local machine, no special privilege is required. I had a local VSS client installed on my server. I went there and launched "SSADMIN.EXE" as my localhost\Admin user. You just need to "Shift" + Right Click on the file and select "Run as different User".  It automatically connected to my local VSS as Admin without asking for password. From there I have connected to my actual network VSS database(From Users-> Open Source Database) . It asked for my network user account to connect to the share since I was running it as localhost Admin. As soon as I entered my network credentials, I have connected to my network VSS database (For which I don't have the Admin password, to be precise,  our VSS admin memory block that stored the password got corrupted).
That's it I have added new Useres, granted full access to me and did everything except changing the Admin password, because it was asking for the old password. But who cares, I got what I want and if necessary, I will use the same hack one more time.

PS: This will work only when you have "Use network name for automatic login" checked.


Tag: Recover VSS Admin Password, Lost VSS Admin Password, Reset VSS Admin Password

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