Firesight Management Console VM on ESXi 'Unable to Authorize Access'

Jonathan Bayless · ‎12-14-2016

I have a Firesight Management Console VM that has been running fine for a couple of months. I tried to log in today and got the following error:

"Unable to authorize access. If you continue to have difficulty accessing this device, please contact the system administrator."

I am the system administrator, of course. :)

I can ssh in easily and console login on the VM works fine as well. This is a version 6.0.1 install that was updated a month and a bit ago (originally 6.0 and patched with whatever was available at the time). The /var/log/messages file shows no outstanding errors and nothing interesting when I try to login.

I have tried rebooting and it seems to start fine, there is free space on the VM and nothing seems wrong. I also checked the SSL cert in the /etc/ssl directory, it is the standard self signed one:

Certificate:
    Data:
        Version: 3 (0x2)
        Serial Number: xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (obfuscated)
    Signature Algorithm: sha256WithRSAEncryption
        Issuer: C=US, CN=firepower, O=Cisco Systems, Inc, OU=Intrusion Management System
        Validity
            Not Before: Jul 8 18:54:21 2016 GMT
            Not After : Jul 8 18:54:21 2036 GMT
        Subject: C=US, CN=firepower, O=Cisco Systems, Inc, OU=Intrusion Management System
        Subject Public Key Info:
            Public Key Algorithm: rsaEncryption
                Public-Key: (2048 bit)

I don't have a support contract on this currently so I would like to be able to figure out what happened on my own. Any suggestions for what to try?

Thanks

Jonathan Bayless · ‎12-19-2016

After fighting TAC on this for 3 days to only have them tell me that the PAK that I purchased, redeemed and used on this device is not registered to me... :/
And they refused to help me figure out who it is registered to or how to fix the situation... :(

I ended up digging further and just tried a password reset according to this procedure:

http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/docs/security/firesight-management-center/118631-technote-firesight-00.html

That seems to have fixed the problem. I am 99% sure I was using the correct password and the dialog did not indicate a password/login failure but seemed to indicate a problem with the authentication system of the software itself. So either that error is worded horribly or they wanted to intentionally make a mistyped password seem like a failure of the server instead of a simple login mistake. Very frustrating, much like almost everything else about Firesight on ASA so far.