Reset Weblogic Admin Password

How to change / reset weblogic admin user password

Every Weblogic Admin will have to reset the admin user password sometime in their career. One might think it only takes a single step to change the weblogic admin user password from the console. It is however not a single step story and involves a series of steps.

Step 1

Login to admin  console
Under Domain Structure, select “Security Realms” option
Click on “myrealm”
Click on tab “Users and Groups"
Click on your admin user
Click on the Passwords tab
Update the password

You might change the admin user password from the console, logout from the existing session and login with new password but you would not able start your server once you will brought it down until you do some more steps which are part of weblogic admin user password change procedure.

In order to avoid this you would have to update the admin server boot.properties file as well.

Here are the steps to change the weblogic admin user password

Workaround - 1
1. Go to "Domain_Name/servers/managed_server/data" for each managed server you have and rename ldap folder to ldap.old and nodemanager folder to nodemanager.old
2. Start managed server(s) from console

Workaround - 2
if you still getting same authentication exception then including workaround-1 first step, follow below steps.

1. Change the nodemanager password from admin console also
Login to admin console
Click on your domain name ( on left hand tree under Domain Structure )
Click on security tab
Click on advance option link
Change "NodeManager Password:"
2. Go to your WL_HOME/common/nodemanager folder and rename nm_data.properties file as nm_data.properties.old
3. Restart node manager
4. Start your managed servers 

Step 2

Now implement the following :

1. Stop your admin server

2. Go to Domain_Name/servers/admin_server/security directory

3. Take backup of existing boot.properties file

4. Create new boot.properties file with below contents

username=admin_user

password=New_password

5. Start the admin server

Vola it should be all set now!!

You would have to implement some more steps if you have managed servers as well in the domain.

Important :

If you always start your managed servers from console and never started using command line (via scripts) by you or by anyone since setup of  the environment then you will not see any boot.properties file under your managed server(s) staging security directory        (Domain_Name/servers/managed_server/security ) and if will try to start managed servers using script then you will be prompt for username and password always untill and unless you will create boot.properties manually under 

Domain_Name/servers/managed_server/security directory.

If you changed the admin user password ( Following the steps mentioned above ) then you would able to stop/start and login from the admin console successfully but you will not be able to start managed the servers once you stop them(you will find the same above highlighted exception in logs ) unless you implement the below mentioned work around.