Active Directory

How to Reset A Windows Server 2008 Domain Password

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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.

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Active Directory and Morphed Folders

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I recently came across a cool tool from Microsoft called Microsoft IT Environment Health Scanner which runs more than 100 checks to help you assess the overall health of your Active Directory and network infrastructure, including the configuration of Active Directory Domain Services, DHCP, DNS, Exchange Server, network adapters, and domain controllers. If the tool detects problems, it links to Microsoft Knowledge Base articles and other Web content for resolution information. I got the tool, installed it and ran it against a client’s network and it exposed some issues in the  Active Directory and network environment that could create problems during server deployments, infrastructure upgrades and migrations.

A good example of what the tool found is the exposure of what is called “Morphed Folders” in the domain controllers. Microsoft describes morphed folders as “…folders and files that have replicated to other servers and are exact copies of one another. When the File Replication Service (FRS) cannot determine which of two folders is most recent, it creates a duplicate folder. These folders are named FolderName_NTFRS_GUIDname, where FolderName is the name of the original folder and GUIDname represents a unique GUID for the morphed folder.”

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