According to the OrangeHRM appliance page it should be admin?! And I just double checked the source code and we're definitely setting the password for the 'admin' user.

So beyond that, I'm wondering if maybe there is something else going on? Are you using a non US-International keyboard? If so, perhaps when you set the password there are some keys that are being misinterpreted via the CLI (but being correctly interpreted via your browser - meaning that they won't match)? Even if you are using a compatible keyboard, then perhaps OrangeHRM itself doesn't like some characters? We have a few appliances that don't like specific characters. Once we know we can blacklist them, but it might take some trial and error to work out which ones if that's the case.

Regardless, if either of those are the case, perhaps try resetting a more simple password initially (if you keep it simple hopefully you can work around the issue). Usually "special characters" (e.g. punctuation) are the ones most likely to cause issues. So perhaps just ry to use lower and upper case with a number or 2? Once you've logged in, you should be able to reset your password through the web UI.

Assuming that you can get root CLI access, you can re-run the first boot script that sets the password like this:

/usr/lib/inithooks/bin/orangehrm.py

Or non-interactively like this (for example):

/usr/lib/inithooks/bin/orangehrm.py --pass='MySecretPassword01

I hope that helps. Please post back if you have any further info and/or continue to have issues. I'd be particularly interested if you discover any characters that definitely don't work.