Unknown user name

[ybpaul]

I started configuring aaa authentication without fully understanding what I was doing. Now whenever I try to telnet to the router I get a username/password prompt. I know I did not configure either and I'm not sure how to get around this with a default username or what ever. I am not opposed to wiping the config clean but I can not get access to the box.

This is on a Cisco 827 with IOS 12.2

[Richard Burts]

This is not an uncommon situation where someone does not understand well what they are doing and manages to lock themselves out of the router. The best solution is to use the password recovery procedure to get into the router while ignoring the existing configuration.

Once you are in the router you can start over again from scratch. Or you can load the configuration from startup-config into running-config, add a user name and password (and possibly fix some aspects of your aaa configuration). In either case be sure to set the config-register back to its original value (usually it is 0x2102).

HTH

Rick

[ybpaul]

Thanks for the suggestion. I tried to do password recovery and still ended up with the request for a username and password

[Richard Burts]

I suspect that there must have been some problem with doing password recovery. If password recovery is done properly then the configuration register is set to 0x2142. When the configuration register is set to 0x2142 then the router reboots but ignores the configuration in NVRAM and operates with the default null configuration. If you were getting the prompt for user name then the router was running with the configuration from NVRAM.

Is it possible to capture the terminal session when you are doing password recovery and post the output here? This might help us figure out what is happening.

HTH

Rick