Restoring config - cannot login with valid password. What's going on?

[burntoc]

I have been running OPNsense for years and I'm on the latest community production version.  I run on a Lenovo M920q with 12GB of ram and an Intel X710-DA2. With my wife and I both WFH and teenage kids the high availability/fast recovery approach is key. I have a second M920q with another Intel X710-DA2 that I want to recover to if there were a hardware or corruption failure (the latter happened before).

I downloaded the latest installer and imported my latest config to the backup device and I see it boot fine. For whatever reason my internet access doesn't work on some of my VLANs/subnets, but on others it does. Weird. Anyway, I try to login with valid credentials (no fat fingering - direct copy/paste from my password manager) and I get a wrong username or password error. None of my 3 admin or 1 service accounts credentials work.

I've tested resetting the root password as a worst case fallback. I reset it (using the support instructions to mount rw and opnsense-shell password) and then login from the console after it completes boot in single user mode, but then I reboot into multi-user mode and I can't login with the new root credentials nor with any of the valid ones from the other accounts.

Can anyone help me understand what's going on? As it stands now I really have no backup and that worries me greatly.

[OPNenthu]

Is this happening on the WebUI login screen as well, or just from the console?  Are you using PuTTY by any chance?

This is a long shot but I'll mention a recent strange experience.  I use PuTTY and in the past I'm pretty sure I was able to copy/paste my login password into the serial prompt and it just worked.  Since a recent change in FreeBSD however relating to UART and serial consoles, I am no longer able to do that.  I now need to manually type the password into the serial console.

SSH is not affected for me.  Only serial.  Using PuTTY for both.