I recently needed to make some updates to a GroundWork Community Edition VM, and found myself in a situation where the admin user’s dashboard (web browser interface) password had been changed to an unknown value. I was able to SSH into the GroundWork VM though (it’s CentOS Linux based). There’s info floating around the net on how to reset the admin password, but it was written for older versions of GroundWork, so some of the default password, and MySQL schema details have changed.

Here’s what I did to reset the admin user’s password on GroundWork Monitor 6.0 Community Edition:

• SSH into the GroundWork VM. If you haven’t changed the root user’s default password, then it’s going to be “opensource”
• Login to MySQL, and run a query to reset the “admin” user’s password to “admin”. The admin password entered below uses a hash:

/usr/local/groundwork/mysql/bin/mysql -u root monarch
update users set password='21232f297a57a5a743894a0e4a801fc3' where user_name='admin';

A contributor to this bias was the fact that I joined the ACM a few years ago while I was in college. I was working with a couple professors on a project that involved using Linux virtualization to teach networking concepts. Anyway, the reason I joined the ACM was that I was asked to give a presentation at an academic computing conference. As I recall, the two requirements for being a presenter were having a .edu email address (check), and ACM membership. I quickly signed up, and failed to investigate what benefits ACM membership would bring.

Fast forward to today. I spend a lot of time reading to keep up on current technologies, and while I am able to do most of this online, I still spend a lot of money each year buying books. A significant portion of these are published by O’Reilly, which writes a lot of excellent Linux, Unix, and development books. Cisco Press’ books make up another significant portion of my collection. Most of the networking products that I work with run either Linux or one of the BSDs, but I’m yet to find a publisher that consistently covers such a wide range of networking topics as well as Cisco Press does.

Many of these O’Reilly and Cisco Press books are available online through Safari. I was once a subscriber, and was happy with their service overall, but at $23/month, membership dues added up. This is where ACM membership comes in. For $99/year, they offer a number of benefits, including the one that I was most interested in – access to a large portion (600) of Safari’s collection of books. Restarting my ACM membership seemed like a no-brainer, given that I was about to spend $60 on one of the Cisco Press titles included in the collection.

I just joined, and taking a look at what else the ACM offers members, like what I see:

• Access to 500 of Books24x7′s books. Looking over the list, I can see that this would be especially useful to those who are more involved in the Microsft and/or management side of things than I am. Actually, there are a few Sybex books on that list that look interesting. I’ve been meaning to brush up on my Java and Oracle, and also see a number of books covering those topics. The Linux books on the list include:
  • Ubuntu Linux Bible
  • Professional Linux 10 Programming
  • Setting up LAMP; Getting Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP Working Together
  • Linux Firewalls: Attack Detection and Response with iptables, psad, and fwsnort
• All 184 issues of the Linux Journal. If you’re not familiar with this magazine, it’s an excellent resource covering all things Linux.
• Element K courses and simulators. I haven’t used these before, but see a course listed for Cisco’s BCMSN exam, which I’m scheduled to take in a few weeks. I’ll check it out.

I feel like I’ve just scratched the service. Even if I don’t find anything else in the membership benefits worth using, $99/year for access to this collection of information is a bargain for a sysadmin who’s serious about learning.