Real-World Scripting: Testing and Changing Administrator Account Passwords

As the chief systems administrator, you're responsible for verifying passwords for the local-machine Administrator accounts on your company's Windows NT servers. Your security policies require that all the administrators change these strong passwords every 60 days. However, the administrators seldom use local accounts to log on. Instead, they usually log on with the domain account, which the domain controller authenticates.

Recently, a primary file server lost its network connectivity because someone improperly configured the subnet mask. Because you were unable to log on with the domain account, you tried to log on with a local account, but the password you had on record was incorrect. As a result, you spent a lot of time hacking into the system to regain control and reset the subnet mask. You couldn't determine whether someone changed the password intentionally or whether someone entered the password incorrectly in both the New Password and Confirm Password edit boxes. . . .