Change the Password for an OpenVZ Container

If you have forgotten the password for an OpenVZ container – relax! Help is at hand.

Luckily OpenVZ makes it very easy to set or reset the password for any user of a container. You’ll need access to the terminal on the hardware node which is running the container to run a simple vzctl command.

vzctl is the CLI command which is used to configure and control an OpenVZ container. Using the –userpassword switch we can reset a users password. We can also use this command to create a new user if the specified user does not already exist.

vzctl set [VMID] --userpasswd [USER]:[PASSWORD]

Run the above command and substitute the following values for your own:

• [VMID] is the ID of the container to set the new password on.
• [USER] is the name of the user that you’d like to change the password for. If this user doesn’t exist then a new user will be created.
• [PASSWORD] is the password to set for the [USER].

Note: The container needs to be running for this command to work as the user information is saved within the container and not in the containers configuration file like many of the other vzctl commands. If the container is not already running, this command will start it.