Introduction
This is short blog post with quick demonstration in how to change the password for the ADMIN user in the RoCE Switches used in Exadata X8M and higher. The process to change the password if very simple and the documentation for that is straight forward, but since the documentation show only the commands and no examples, I decided to write this blog post just to share a example of what you should expect when executing the commands.
The official documentation is here:
Demo
1) From any compute node, switch to dbmadmin user:
[root@exa01db01 ~]# su - dbmadmin
2) Connect via SSH to the target RoCE Switch with admin user:
[dbmadmin@exa01db01 ~]$ ssh admin@exa01sw1-roc1User Access VerificationPassword:Password:
When you are connected to the switch, you should see a legal information like this:
Cisco Nexus Operating System (NX-OS) Software TAC support: http://www.cisco.com/tac Copyright (C) 2002-2025, Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. The copyrights to certain works contained in this software are owned by other third parties and used and distributed under their own licenses, such as open source. This software is provided "as is," and unless otherwise stated, there is no warranty, express or implied, including but not limited to warranties of merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose. Certain components of this software are licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL) version 2.0 or GNU General Public License (GPL) version 3.0 or the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) Version 2.1 or Lesser General Public License (LGPL) Version 2.0. A copy of each such license is available at http://www.opensource.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.php and http://opensource.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html and http://www.opensource.org/licenses/lgpl-2.1.php and http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/library.txt.
3) Checking the switch details
If you want to confirm what is the exact model of the current switch, you can execute the “show version” command that presents the Software and Hardware details along with other information. For this kind of maintenance, usually the NXOS version and the Hardware Chassis model are the most important things to know.
Example:
exa01sw1-roc1# show version
And you should see something like this (edited output):
Software BIOS: version 05.52 NXOS: version 10.3(7) [Maintenance Release] BIOS compile time: 12/03/2024 NXOS image file is: bootflash:///nxos64-cs.10.3.7.M.bin NXOS compile time: 2/08/2025 20:00:00 [01/24/2025 18:32:00] Hardware cisco Nexus9000 C9336C-FX2 Chassis Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU D-1526 @ 1.80GHz with 24545588 kB of memory. Processor Board ID FLM2720093B Device name: exa01sw1-roc1 bootflash: 115805708 kB
4) Execute the command change-password:
exa01sw1-roc1# change-passwordEnter old password:Enter new password:Confirm new password:Password type (5|8|9) : [5]
If requested for Password type, you can accept the default type 5 that uses MD5 to hashes the password in the configuration file. If you are interested in more secure protocol like SHA-256, you can select type 8 or 9, but first you should take a look at official Cisco documentation about these types.
5) After changing the password, make the running config persistent to the next startup:
exa01sw1-roc1# copy running-config startup-config[########################################] 100%Copy complete, now saving to disk (please wait)...Copy complete.exa01sw1-roc1#
Conclusion
This example was executed in a Exadata X10M equipped with the switch Cisco Nexus9000 C9336C-FX2 running the NXOS version 10.3(7). Some behavior can change over time and depending on the NXOS version you are using, so it important to always check the official documentation for that. As mentioned in the introduction, the idea of this blog post is just show a example in case you never executed this procedure before.