Login with password I just created doesn't work, neither does the password reset link

[Matt Folger]

I just setup the login for a local instance of Jira.  I copied and pasted the login information into our password database where we store nearly 200 other account logins without problem.  Moments after setup, I put that same password in the login screen as a way to try and see if I could get in, nope.  Wouldn't accept either username for the myatlassian user or the local Jira user.  They both have the same password.  The forgot password link also doesn't work, which isn't surprising seeing as Jira wasn't configured with any email criteria, so I don't know how it would expect to function out of box.

[Andy Heinzer]

For an initial setup of Jira Server, you do have to define both the username and the password in the setup wizard the first time Jira is started up.  These account credentials are in no way tied to your myatlassian account credentials.    

When you ran this setup wizard, what kind of database did you choose?  If you selected the internal database (HSQL), and you have not done anything in Jira yet, I would actually recommend selecting a new supported database and connecting that to your Jira site instead via the appropriate guide.  I recommend this because the hsql database is tedious to try to recover SQL data from, and it's not really a good platform to use for any production Jira instance. It's really only useful for an evaluation to quickly get Jira started.

However if you're using a supported database with Jira, such as postgres, mysql, oracle, or ms sql, then I'd recommend following the Retrieving the Jira Administrator guide.  It explains how you can use a series of SQL commands to locate the admin account and reset the password via SQL if need be.   That guide can allow you to reset the password of an Internal Jira user account provided you have access to the SQL database.