Quick Tip – EA Server: Reset Jagadmin Password

Introduction

This is a really quick tip on how to reset password for the administrator id “jagadmin” used in EA Server. We use this id for everything from running it in development to production environment, only difference being in DEV we don’t have a password for the id, to make it easier to move from machine to machine.

By default, there is no password for the jagadmin id. The problem is, once you set a password, you cannot reset the password directly. The tools Jaguar manager (GUI) and the Jagtool (command line version) don’t allow you to reset password “for security reasons”. After I Googled a bit, I found a way.

Surprisingly, all you have to do to reset the password is to remove the line that has the below setting in the file called jaguar.props (this is the properties of the server itself, named jaguar).

com.sybase.jaguar.server.jagadminpassword=<password>

Where the <password> itself is stored encrypted.

This tip is only about resetting the password. So, I won’t go into any further detail here. But this opens up the bigger topic about the default security model in Sybase EA Server, which seems very weak. The administrator id, jagadmin is the default id and is needed if you want to do anything serious with EA Server. But, we manage to make it secure enough. More on this later.

If you are new to EA Server (also Jaguar), several of the terms will be new to you. I intend to write more on EA Server in a future post. Please check back again later.