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Pinned Note

Microsoft's Lockoutstatus.exe

Quite often at work I must either reset a users password or unlock their account. It's no big deal, not a problem for me to do it at all. I don't mind doing it, that is part of my job. Like most IT guys, I'm always on the lookout for things to make my job easier or somewhat automated.

I should explain something first: When I get a call from a user who needs their password reset, under normal circumstances I would tell them to wait 90 minutes and their account will unlock itself. But some people cant wait that long or they have simply forgot the password. FIne. I reset the password on each domain controller to make it replicate faster. To most of my customers they can't even wait for replication.

With that explained, I can continue. Lockoutstatus.exe is a part of a resource kit from Microsoft. You can download the tools here It installs very easily. It was a very exciting prospect for me before I used it. I tried it out to unlock someone's account and it worked like a charm. No more would I have to do so much clicking to connect to each DC (domain controller), there are sometimes 15 DC's in some of our domains; and then find their account and unlock it or reset the password, that took.................Minutes. Now, with this tool it might only take ................A minute. Less clicking and less typing = less work for me.

Then I tried the reset password feature. It told me that I hadn't met the password complexity requirements. I had. Believe me I met the requirements. I did some searching on google and found a cached page that said the new version of lockoutsatus.exe supposedly fixed an error where the program makes the password blank unintentionally. Hmmm.....those joksters at Microsoft. Another "feature" of a MS product. I posted the error "error in ds:cpp:1602
" on a couple of MS sponsored boards, but got the usual responses. People asking if I had, infact met the password requirements. No one knows the answer to this problem. The tool isn't completely useless, but I'm disappointed.

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