Partners Stunned By Cisco Password Snafu

Partners are scratching their heads as Cisco reveals that it shipped servers with the wrong default password to customers for more than seven weeks.

"It's extremely rare for Cisco -- has never happened before," said Jamie Shepard, senior vice president of health care and strategy at Lumenate, an Addison, Texas-based Cisco partner. "It's rare overall, as testing and [quality assurance] in I.T. has been very strong."

From Nov. 17, 2015, to Jan. 6, 2016, the San Jose, Calif.-based networking giant shipped a number of C-Series servers -- including UCS -- with a default password unknown to its customers, which prevented administrators from logging into their servers.

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The default password was supposed to be "password," but Cisco had changed it to "Cisco1234" sometime in November without telling its customers.

"I haven't experienced this often -- it seems fairly rare," said Robert Keblusek, chief technology officer of Downers Grove, Ill.-based Sentinel Technologies, a Cisco Gold partner.

In a statement to CRN, Cisco said that on Jan. 11, 2016, it released a notification alerting customers that the passwords were incorrectly provisioned at factory locations.

"Cisco has taken appropriate corrective action in factory locations and also proactive measures to inform customers to eliminate disruption in Cisco Rack Server deployments," the company said in the statement.

The alert also explains workaround solutions to solve the issue, although the networking vendor has yet to explain the reason behind the password error.

Partners told CRN they expect the problem to have little to no impact on their Cisco business.

"I can see a customer self-deploying having an issue and needing to open support tickets as a result, but we generally have excellent communications with Cisco and hear about these things early enough that they don't impact our deployment team," said Keblusek. "I haven't heard of any impact, delay or embarrassment in the field from our perspective. Our deployments are proceeding as normal."

Shepard speculated that the issue could have been because of a massive adoption rate of Cisco UCS.

"This is just a sign of how fast people have adopted UCS as they are cranking out features and functionalities," said Shepard.

Cisco introduced its highly popular UCS solution in 2009. For its most recent quarterly earnings in November, Cisco reported its data center business, which includes UCS, was up 24 percent year over year, at $859 million.

"Maybe this was an error due to how customers are just loving UCS and have had zero issues since their release," said Shepard.

PUBLISHED JAN. 14, 2016