Recovering Cloud Virtual Machine Access without GRUB (QEMU/OpenStack)
Context A client reached out to me a little while ago to ask if it was possible to recover access to a VM that one of his clients use. This Ubuntu 22.04 based VM runs on our OpenStack cloud, powered by QEMU/KVM. The client’s client had made some modifications to /etc/ssh/sshd_config and subsequently locked themselves out of the machine. It’s important to note here that cloud instances (VMs) typically don’t include a default password set and rely solely on key-pair authentication via SSH....