Purpose

Hipchat Server comes with a default SSH user called admin and the default password: hipchat. Renaming the user is not recommended but changing the password is possible.

Solution

While renaming the user is technically possible via usermod, doing so will have serious consequences on the system and break core functionalities. The admin user is hard-coded in our Chef templates and is needed by several processes. This can be noticed by running:

grep -rw admin /hipchat-scm/chef-repo/* --color

The admin user password can be changed as follows: 

1. SSH to the server as admin with the old password
2. Run passwd
3. Follow the instructions to change the password