How to change the Admin Password when it is lost?

Sometimes it happens, that you might loose a password. You simply forget it or cannot find that piece of paper where you wrote it down. That is a pretty pesky situation. But what should you do in a case like this? Often software has a recovery mechanism where you have to answer specific questions. Or you have to contact the support team of a website to make them help you. But what is your chances if this happens with your LogAnalyzer password? LogAnalyzer doesn’t have a integrated recovery mechanism, nor is it very helpful to contact Adiscon, because we have no chance of resetting it. But you can do that yourself.

The passwords are stored as MD5 hashes in the database. This is where you have to act, to recover your password. Create a new temporary installation of LogAnalyzer on your webserver. Simply put the install files in a new folder and install LogAnalyzer as usual. To be on the safe side, use a new temporary database for the installation. When you come to the point of setting your Admin Password, simply choose a password that you can remember easily. After the installation use PHPMyAdmin and navigate the new temporary database and find the password. You can find it in the table “logcon_users”. Copy the MD5 hash from the password field. Now you go to your original database for LogAnalyzer, navigate to the “logcon_users” table and insert the MD5 hash in the password field for the Admin Account.

You have now successfully recovered your password for the Admin account. You can now delete your temporary installation of LogAnalyzer from your webserver and delete the temporary database as well.

Please note, this should only be done if you really know what you are doing.