Infrastructure Credentials: HPE iLO 4

When updating or rotating credentials for this hardware, the following strict physical and protocol limitations must be followed:

• Strict Length Limit: Passwords MUST be between 8 and 20 characters in length. The underlying IPMI protocol silently truncates anything past 20 characters, which causes a silent mismatch that locks users out of the Web Dashboard.
• Character Requirements: Passwords must contain a mix of uppercase letters, lowercase letters, and numeric digits.
• The Special Character Limitation: If utilizing symbols (such as !, $, or *), the password must be injected via the local host CLI using single quotes (`'…'`) to prevent Linux Bash history expansion from corrupting the string.

Best Practice: To set a password longer than 20 characters or one with highly complex symbols, first assign a simple temporary alphanumeric password via the local terminal to gain entry, then perform the final password update directly inside the iLO 4 Web UI settings page.

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To audit the state of these accounts at any time from the local host shell, load the IPMI driver modules and query channel 2:

sudo modprobe ipmi_si && sudo modprobe ipmi_devintf
sudo ipmitool user list 2

Remote command-line access requires passing legacy cryptographic ciphers to accommodate the iLO 4 management processor:

ssh -o KexAlgorithms=+diffie-hellman-group14-sha1 -o HostKeyAlgorithms=+ssh-rsa Administrator@<iLO_IP>