topic Re: CMX Admin SSH lockout in Wireless

CMX Admin SSH lockout

Chris40 — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 19:00:08 GMT

Hello,

We recently migrated to the VM version of CMX and ran into an issue with the admin account an logging into SSH. It looks like after 35+ days of user inactivity SSH access is being denied. We can unlock the account with console access but its a pain as we dont manage the servers they live on. What security policy needs to be changed to extend or disable the SSH lockout for the admin account. On cmx version 10.6.3-146

Re: CMX Admin SSH lockout

Mark Elsen — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 19:12:17 GMT

- @Chris40 Probably a feature of the underlying Linux OS ; try in linux shell : sudo chage -I -1 admin
to disable inactivity lockout.

Re: CMX Admin SSH lockout

Stefan Mihajlov — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 20:15:52 GMT

@Chris40
The issue is caused by the underlying OS password aging policy which automatically locks the account after a period of inactivity, you can permanently fix this by logging in as root and running chage -I -1 cmxadmin to disable the inactivity timer 🙂

Re: CMX Admin SSH lockout

Chris40 — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 20:15:54 GMT

Any way to run this command without root access? Looks like a TAC case needs to be opened to generate a token.

Re: CMX Admin SSH lockout

Chris40 — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 20:35:19 GMT

output for sudo chage -i -1

Sorry, user cmxadmin is not allowed to execute '/bin/chage -i -1' as root

Re: CMX Admin SSH lockout

Stefan Mihajlov — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 20:45:55 GMT

@Chris40

Open TAC case, its faster way 🙂

Re: CMX Admin SSH lockout

Mark Elsen — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 08:15:51 GMT

- @Chris40 Sorry, user cmxadmin is not allowed to execute '/bin/chage -i -1' as root
In VMware you could , mount the (root) partition of the CMX VM on another host
and manually change /etc/shadow as in :
cmxadmin:$6$...:19800:0:99999:7:30:20000:
cmxadmin:$6$...:19800:0:99999:7:-1:20000:

The above is example content, only pay attention to changing the colored value.