Visitor II

Question

Fortigate-30E - Recovery of a lost administrator account name and password

8 replies
141 views

Hello

On FortiGate 30E with FortiOS v6.2.3 build 1066 (GA), the administrator user name and password have been changed.

Unfortunatly the credentials have been lost.

The default admin account is disabled or deleted.

There is no other account.

is there a way to recover the administrator access, without losing the configuration?

Thanks for your help.

Philippe

Toshi_Esumi

SuperUser

Looks like FTNT dropped the document for the recovery method w/ “maintainer” from their KBs, which was available before v7.2.4. So you need to find the instruction via AI tools or 3rd party online instructions like below.

Toshi

P

philm92Author

Visitor II

Thanks Toshi.
I tried this method, but my issue is that for security reason the admin user as been removed or disabled. In this case this method do not work.

And I don’t know the new administrator user name.

Regards

Toshi_Esumi

SuperUser

What it doesn’t work? You just need to create a new “admin” user once you got in with “maintainer”. In the video, “admin”’s account profile seems to be automatically set but you might need to add below during the “admin” user creation.
set accprofile “super_admin”.

If you somehow can’t create “admin” user, you can create any random name. Then set the account profile as “super_admin”. Then it would work as the original admin user.

Toshi

P

philm92Author

Visitor II

Thanks Toshi.

You mean the “set accprofile “super_admin”” in the CLI, logged as maintainer, will recreate the admin account. Am I right?

Toshi_Esumi

SuperUser

Yes. Technically you can not “disable” any admin users with FortiOS. And with the older versions, you can not “delete” the default super admin “admin”. So I don’t understand what you’re describing. With the video, now I realize it’s just “re-configuring” the existing “admin” user’s password because the account profile of “admin” is already “super_admin”. But if you create a new admin user name, you need to set the account profile to “super_admin”. Otherwiser, the user would have many limitations and doesn’t work like “admin”.

Toshi

Toshi_Esumi

SuperUser

Looks like I was wrong. Gemini says “maintainer” can not crate a new user. Only can reset the default “admin” password.

Toshi

P

philm92Author

Visitor II

Thanks Toshi

osoleimani

Staff

Hi Philippe,

Following up on the discussion above, there is an important distinction between recovering the password of an existing administrator account and recovering access when the administrator account itself has been removed.

For FortiOS 6.2.x, the maintainer account is intended to reset the password of an existing super_admin account. It is not a mechanism for creating a new administrator account.

In your case, you mentioned that the original admin account was disabled or deleted and that you do not know the name of the replacement account. If the only super_admin account was actually removed and there is no other administrator account, the maintainer password-reset procedure would therefore not address the situation.

If you have a configuration backup from before the administrator account was removed, that is worth checking as a possible recovery path. Fortinet documents a separate procedure for restoring the default admin account from a configuration backup.

So the key distinction is:

Existing super_admin account with an unknown password → maintainer password reset.
No remaining super_admin account → a different recovery procedure is required.

Hope this clarifies the recovery options for your specific situation.

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