You wouldn’t think that changing your password would be a big deal. Enter your old password, enter the new password twice, that’s it. Except if you’re on a Windows domain…
The domain policy is set up to force us to change passwords every 90 days, as a standard security precaution. It never fails though — within hours of changing the password, the Weird Things start happening. Some shares remain accessible, some start giving me vague authentication errors, some claim they don’t exist anymore…
After a quick trip to the admin’s office, it’s discovered that my account is locked out because of too many failed password attempts. Of course there was no explicit warning of this at my own workstation as I had continued to be able to lock and unlock the console without trouble… I had however left myself logged in on my other development system under the previous password, and it was what was causing the failed password attempts.
Fine, I log out and back in on that system, unlock my account, and everything’s back to normal. Until a few hours later when the Weird Things start up again…
After roaming from office to office checking all of our test systems, I finally find one of our rarely-used systems that I had logged into two months ago to test something and forgotten to log out of. After logging out of that one and unlocking the account yet again, things are *finally* normal for good. Or at least until the next password change.
You’d think there would be a better way of handling this…
Sounds… fun. One thing I hate about Windows – the password crap. I had something similar happen to me when I came back from a weekend. Ugh. Annoying. Of course, then, it takes eighteen hours for someone in DSS to come down, only to tell you to “reboot” – do they find these people out of cracker jack boxes? What’s the story? Haven’t figured that one out yet. So yeah, I feel your pain. :P