Last Updated on December 2, 2019 by Christopher G Mendla
I have a bunch of sites on a host that uses the Frontpage 2002 extended server.
I had forgotten the User ID and password for one of my sites for Frontpage publishing.
When I went into the Frontpage administration panel at http://www.mysite.com/padmcgi.exe I saw an optioo to RESET USER PASSWORD. OK.. However, when you choose that option, you need to know the user ID that you are resetting. For the life of me, I couldn’t remember what that was.
BE CAREFUL WITH THE FOLLOWING, YOU CAN SCRAMBLE THINGS OR LOCK YOURSELF OUT PERMANENTLY
So, I fired up my Core FTP and ftp’d into my host. The site lived at /var/www/sitefolder. In that folder is a folder called /var/www/sitefolder/_vti_pvt/ If you go into that folder, there is a file called ROLES. Open that file and you should see a section marked [USERS]. That will show you the users for the web. In most cases, there will only be one user and that user will be an admin.
Now that you know the ID, go back to your web based Virtual Server admin panel and choose RESET USER PASSWORD.
You will see a dropdown box where you can select the virtual server where you want to reset the password. BE CAREFUL NOT TO RESET YOUR :80 password.
In my case, I left the web name blank. I typed in the user name I had found above. SUCCESS!! it worked. !!.
So, now I am able to publish that site again.
BTW – you should be able to get FTP access for your hosting. That is independent of the Frontpage extensions security.