I recently got a desperate call from a friend I helped to set up a domain running Windows server 2008. Apparently, something happened and nobody could log on to the server. My first thought was password expiration so I told them to just log on as domain admin and reset the passwords of the affected users.

Things got interesting when the next question was, “What is the password?”. Now, this was a year after the initial installation and I did not have the password – as a matter of principle, I encourage clients to change the initial password after an installation is completed so they have the assurance that I will not “sneak in”. They took my advise. (more…)