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Author Topic: Administrator password recovery  (Read 1442 times)

trowbell

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Administrator password recovery
« on: October 13, 2014, 10:05:11 pm »

I'm not sure how this would have changed however I can no longer switch to Administrator as it doesn't take the password. I noticed it no longer worked when I updated to the .21 build yesterday. Is there a way to recover or change the password? I can see the hashed value in the user.jmd and the others users I have created, which can access all of them. I read the notes in the wiki under users and I know I can't just edit the file as it would break other things.

The values in the file:
[Password removed]
<Item Name="DisplayName">Administrator</Item>

Thanks
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glynor

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Re: Administrator password recovery
« Reply #1 on: October 14, 2014, 03:41:30 pm »

I think you could just nuke the user.jmd file.  That'd delete all of your users though.

Don't know if there is any other way.
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trowbell

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Re: Administrator password recovery
« Reply #2 on: October 14, 2014, 10:01:46 pm »

Thanks for the suggestion. I did back everything up and try it before I posted asking for help and it does work however I don't trust it to not possibly break other things which might cause me more/other problems later. That and I really don't want to retag 2700+ movies and shows with the user information again. It's the middle ground of PG and PG13 that each have to be looked at and decided which kids should be allowed to play.

I suppose if this forum is my only hope without the devs having a way to figure it out the program could probably be improved. I can't imagine if I ran this for a business to not have a means to recover or reset it without affecting the rest of the files.
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glynor

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Re: Administrator password recovery
« Reply #3 on: October 15, 2014, 01:05:17 am »

I don't think removing the user.jmd file is likely to cause other "unnamed issues".  Perhaps someone from JRiver can comment, but I'm betting that is the escape hatch.
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trowbell

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Re: Administrator password recovery
« Reply #4 on: October 15, 2014, 10:21:38 am »

I would hope it wouldn't cause problems either, I'm just going from the wiki http://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/Users which has the warning over the user.jmd file:

DO NOT MODIFY THIS FILE (doing so will damage the Library).

I did test a new theory last night though from thinking on a previous attempt to fix the issue. I had tried a reinstall which rewrites the user.jmd file with only administrator. The DB then shows Unknown User (100x) for each of the other users I had created. So I went ahead and recreated the users via MC20 in the same order as the original user.jmd file I have backed up (1001 adult, 1002 teen etc); the file now looks the same except for the hashed passwords of course. Doing that the Unknown Users came back with the appropriate tags in the DB so all seems to look ok.

Now if someone in the know could confirm I haven't created a future time-bomb by doing so I'll run with my "fix".

-Joe
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Matt

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Re: Administrator password recovery
« Reply #5 on: October 15, 2014, 10:48:16 am »

The file is a binary safe, so I don't think I can provide details to edit it.  You can see the encrypted password, but it's decrypted with a constant factor and not easy to share.

However, I don't think removing the file would hurt.  Just add the same users again, and the "User" field in the library will still work.
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glynor

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Re: Administrator password recovery
« Reply #6 on: October 15, 2014, 03:19:11 pm »

I'm just going from the wiki http://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/Users which has the warning over the user.jmd file:

DO NOT MODIFY THIS FILE (doing so will damage the Library).

I wrote that, though I was copying what Matt wrote in the original thread announcing the feature.

I meant, don't edit the file, because it is binary, and the instructions there (which were for special automation purposes) had you opening the file in a text editor to learn the UserIDs.  Changing a single character in the file in Notepad++ and clicking save would be likely to break the whole thing.  That warning was specific to the Automation section in that page on the Wiki.

As Matt said, I don't think we can make any firm promises because you're a bit out in the weeds here.  But I have personally deleted my own user.jmd file entirely in my own Library (when I made all those weird modifications to my Library when writing that article on the Wiki) and I've had no issues.
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