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Situation:

I'm wanting to sell 2 servers which I haven't used in 2 years. They were housed in a proper datacenter but when I no longer needed them the datacenter shipped them to me and I have had them safely stored for the past 2 years. I turned both of them on and they booted up with no issue and then prompted me for root password. The servers are both running the OpenVZ Slave Centos6 template. The motherboards are supermicro and have IPMI which I remember using when they were housed at a datacenter.

Question:

I don't remember the passwords to root or IPMI. Assuming whoever I sell them to is going to install their own OS would it be acceptable to send a server without its root password or IPMI password? Or should I go through the process of installing a new OS just to be able to provide a root password and also be able to change the IPMI password (not sure how the actual IPMI setup works but looking at other SF questions ipmi tool seems easy enough)?

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    Nobody cares about the OS, or even expects one to be installed, but if IPMI isn't accessible it will significantly reduce the resale value of the server.
    – Michael Hampton
    Oct 1, 2020 at 1:15

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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Best practice here, and best experience for the buyer would be to do the following:

  • Wipe the Hard Drives (DBAN or similar)
  • Figure out how to reset the IPMI password
  • Reset the BIOS to factory defaults, making sure there are no passwords set there.

As mentioned in a comment to your question by Michael, not having the IPMI accessible for use by the buyer will significantly reduce the resale value. If you are unable to recover access to the IPMI, please be sure to clearly label this on the posting when you sell it.

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    Note: Use only Secure Erase or a vendor-provided tool to erase SSDs. DBAN is suitable for mechanical hard drives only (and even says so on its homepage). It's not capable of erasing an SSD properly, and attempting to do so would only put excessive wear on the drive without actually deleting all the data.
    – Michael Hampton
    Oct 1, 2020 at 14:10

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