Admin’s Arsenal
Recover your lost Windows 7, XP, Vista or 2000 Passwords.
Jul 7th
I orginally wrote about this way back when in 2006 when AskTheAdmin was just born. Now here I am 4 years later writing about the same tool! This is not just any tool though this is the Offline NT Password Recovery Boot CD. By downloading this ISO and burning it to a cd – you can then boot to this CD and change or blank out passwords by loading the SAM database offline hence the name offline password recovery.
It is as simple as booting to the CD, choosing the account and doing the deed. You write your changes back to the drive and reboot.
When you are back at the Windows login screen you will now be able to use the password you enetered or a blank password (just hit enter)
Here are the links to download the image:
- cd100627.zip (~4MB) – Bootable CD image. (md5sum: 6d80cdfbba97457e413f95a3554d9524 cd100627.zip)
- cd080802.zip (~3MB) – Previous version CD image. (md5sum: 33ecd38263f935b82e7b2e3e9f5de563)
and there is even a Floppy Disk release that is no longer updated:
Floppy release (not updated anymore), see below on how to use them
- bd080526.zip (~1.4M) – Bootdisk image (md5sum: 37889e4c540504e59132bdcdfe7f9bb7)
- drivers1-080526.zip (~310K) – Disk drivers (mostly PATA/SATA) (md5sum: 72ac1731c6ba735d0ac2746a30dbc3ee)
- drivers2-080526.zip (~1.2M) – Disk drivers (mostly SCSI) (md5sum: 30172bec657c85a5f1a0b43601452fb7)
This CD has saved my ass a number of times! Do you have another method of recovering lost passwords? We would love to hear about them in the comments! You can also check out their website for FAQ’s and other helpful hints here.
Have you seen this post on opening a command prompt during a windows install? Using this you can start a recovery install jump to a command prompt and run:
control userpasswords2
and bingo bango you can change your passwords!
Do you need a FREE SSL Certificate? For dev or production?
May 27th
I have been doing a lot of side web work recently – times are tough! So I have needed to do some SSL testing for a client and instead of requisitioning for some certs I discovered a free source of them on the web thanks to our good friends over at Bauer-Power.
Check out the post below:
So I get an email from Disqus the other day like I always do when someone comments on a blog post. Often times if someone posts a link in the comment I get an approval email from Disqus. Most of the time if there is a link it is spam and I mark it as spam via email and I’m on my way, but occasionally someone will post a comment to something very useful, and that is how this article begins!
I received a comment from a reader by the name of Tony Jobson on my article on how to setup SSTP VPN in Windows server 2008. In that article I mentioned how you can get an SSL certificate from GoDaddy for $12.99. I thought that was the best deal in town, but I was wrong!
You can get a FREE, fully functional SSL certificate from StartSSL! Yes, I said free, and it works with most browsers and services! I signed up for a free account, and tested it on my home SSTP VPN, and it worked without issue! I even setup a StartSSL cert on my personal start page for the hell of it! It’s free, why not?
From their page:
What?
Security and encryption is getting ever more important in today’s computer networks, being it SSL secured web sites, encryption of data or mail, secure logon to mention just a few. But security is expensive, right? Not anymore….
StartCom, the vendor and distributor of StartCom Linux Operating Systems, also operates MediaHost™, a hosting company, which offered its clients, SSL secured web sites with certificates signed by StartCom for many years. That’s where the idea originated: Free SSL certificates!
How?
Most web servers, such as Apache and IIS are capable of running the 128/256-bit secured and encrypted SSL protocol. Most mail clients can encrypt and sign your electronic mail messages. All you need, in most cases, is a SSL or S/MIME certificate to make it work. StartCom provides certificates through an easy web based interface wizard and sign up process – free of charge. With our installation instructions, you’ll have your secured web site running or your email exchange secured within minutes.
Why?
Because we believe in the right to protect and secure information between two entities without discrimination of race, origin and financial capabilities. By applying a completely different and new business model compared to traditional certification authorities, we are able to prove here, that digital certificates can cost much less or may be even free of charge! Instantly! Furthermore, every certificate from StartCom is insured up to US$ 10,000 if your customers were to suffer financial loss as a direct result of relying on a certificate that was issued through our negligence! This and other measures permits the visitors and customers of your site to fully rely and trust in StartCom.
Where, when?
The StartCom Certification Authority is today supported by most important platforms like Microsoft Windows, Apple Macintosh OS X and many Linux operating systems and browsers like Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Safari and Google’s Chrome provide built-in support. Should you be using an older or unsupported browser you may import our CA certificate.
The next time you or your company are looking to secure a website, create an SSL VPN, setup a simple secure mail server, etc. You don’t have to waste gobs of money when you can get it for free!
Do you or your company use StartSSL? How do you like it so far? Any reason why you wouldn’t want to use them? Let me know in the comments!
Finding out what computer your AD user is logged into easily, quickly and free!
Apr 16th
Today I had to track down a user. There computer was either not configured with the proper naming convention, they installed a firewall or some sort of combination of other issues. I download a sysinternal tool called PSLoggedOn from the PSTools toolkit which while I could not find it from Microsoft I was able to locate it and upload it to AskTheAdmin’s servers here.
Microsoft describes the tools as follows:
PsLoggedOn is part of a growing kit of Sysinternals command-line tools that aid in the administration of local and remote systems named PsTools.
Runs on:
- Client: Windows XP and higher.
- Server: Windows Server 2003 and higher.
We have covered the PSTools Toolkit before here as well. To use it simply run it from the command line with the syntax psloggedon.exe username or computername
So in this instance I ran psloggedon joes to query all my network machines to see which one joes is logged into like so:
This is what I returned:
I saw all the machine the user in question is logged on to and the machines I was unable to query. Now I can run scripts using the machine name and not have to set login scripts for the user. Good luck! And we would love to hear what you are doing on your AD network!
What kind of network magic do you have going on?
File Transfer Time/Speed Calculator
Feb 22nd
Check out this link for a great transfer time/speed calculator. You select the file size and the speed of your line and it will aproximate the transfer time! Sweet
Ask The Admin Reviews: Host Gator
Feb 5th
Hey Kiddies, Commodore 64 here to bring another tidbit of good advice from all of us to all of you. Along with this tasty piece of techie goodness is a brief admin-ography of the history of AskTheAdmin.com. We’ve come a long way folks, and we think we’ve finally found the true nexus point of our platform needs.
HostGator!
If you’ve been following us throughout the years, you’ve probably experienced the growing pains we’ve had moving from platform to platform, host to host. Our humble beginnings on Blogger dealing with all the limitations and WYSIWYG inconsistencies, then our HUGE fiasco getting our posts, media, and comments migrated, exported, and sometimes even re-written from scratch and re-imported one by tedious one.
Following the imports to our now defunct web host, Bansal-Inc, we were plagued with outages, server errors, php errors, unexpected reboots, files disappearing (wtf?) and older versions re-appearing (seriously now, WTFluck). It was like something out of The Twilight Zone with the title of “Ghost in the Machine.” It was utter chaos.
On top of all the server-side issues, I’d like to spend a minute to mention how far WordPress has come as a platform as well as an all around user experience from front to back.
Back then, around version 2.5 or 2.6, the WYSIWYG was HORRIBLE. Having already spent many years in the field of front-end web development, the amount of “code rewriting” and “automatic formatting” that went on was horrible. Mixed into that was the advent of Windows Livewriter, which in my opinion, was too good of an editing tool to be justifiably paired with a crappy, built-in, wordpress wysiwyg from back then.
Essentially what would end up happening is that in a writers role, it wasn’t half bad. You said your peace, did a little formatting and published. But from an editor’s perspective – re-opening a post and simply switching from HTML view to Visual view would change the code drastically: replacing massive amounts of tags and flucking up all bullet points and various other elements. Aside from editing issues, plugins we were utilizing were crashing the site here and there. I remember there being a lot of fear associated with running a well-trafficked site in our situation, as it was.
Reaching out to tech support, especially when it’s overseas, was painful at best. Response times, even when they were responding, took days sometimes. We ended having to fish through our emails and find the email address of the company owner. It was only then we could get something done.
Just when we thought our problems were over… the company got sold to a web hosting service then called Inspirit Networks. We had a decent run with Inspirit. At first they were eager to please. But as time went on (we’re talking months, not years) the servers and support’s response times were getting worse and more unresponsive with each passing week. Ultimately we suffered major outages for days at a time which also seemed to strangely roll back our files to older versions. This was the last straw.
After major shopping around and considerations we decided on HostGator. The reviews were all good, and after testing their US based voice support lines, as well as chat lines we were thoroughly impressed.
Enter HostGator…
So far I’ve been personally using them for about a year now with no issues, and so far %100 uptime. Utilizing a free service called aremysitesup.com, I’ve been able to see that we have had NO DOWNTIME. The cpanel has all the options I’ve ever needed or wanted in a LAMP hosting account. We are currently running 8 different well trafficked blogs on one hosting account and see no slowdown and no issues. Truthfully, I’ve never been accustomed to being this fear-free and comfortable with my web server.
These days we can spend our time concentrating on publishing quality content rather than keeping our sites running and healthy.
Edit: We now have our own coupon discount code at Gator, which means we can pass along a savings of $9.94 off of your initial purchase with Gatorhost.
Use discount code “asktheadmin” to get your discount today!
This is commodore64 signing off.
Let us know what your web hosting experiences were in the comments below…
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How Can I Change Local Passwords on A LOT of Workstations? (2 Years Ago Today)
Jan 5th
I know the feeling of your secure network being compromised by an end user… Passwords do fall into the wrong hands and then what do you do? Scenarios start running through my head and I make a mental list of all the passwords and system configs that need to be changed. These aren’t fun times in Admin land but they usually breed scripts and easier ways to do the necessary!
El Di Pablo tell us of his experiences… And is culminated by using a Great tool that AtA LOVES! Check it out…
I had a bit of a scare the other day. I get a call from a user in the field.
She is traveling with her laptop and she was calling from her hotel. she was complaining that she couldn’t log into her laptop using her normal log in credentials, and that the only way she could log in was using the local administrators account.
“Local Admin what?!?!”
I exclaimed then started hyperventilating. I asked her how she came across the local administrator password, and she told me that one of the techs at the company that is no longer with us gave it to her a long time ago.
I asked her to spell out the password for me, and low and behold it was the corporate standard.
I ran to my bosses office and reported the compromise, and recommended changing the local passwords. He agreed and called a meeting with me, our head desktop technician and one of the senior systems administrators to come up with a plan of attack. I told them that I can easily change these passwords using a script and pspasswd.exe that comes with Sysinternals PSTools.
I told them that I can export a list of all of the workstations on the network from Active directory, and put them in a text file. pspasswd will read directly from the list in the text file and change the password of the specified account on each computer in the list. I showed each of the guys in the meeting how it works, and they agreed that my script would be the best way to go with this.
Here is an example of the syntax used in my script. Keep in mind that this script must be ran from within the directory containing the pspasswd.exe program or else you have to modify the script to change into it’s directory. Of course, if you know batch scripting well, you can add all sorts of stuff to the script, but the basic run command looks like this:
>set /p filename=”Please enter name of computer list (ie: computers): “
>pspasswd @%filename%.txt -u administrator@domain.com -p password
administrator newpassword >> %filename%-results.txt
You’ll notice that I added an output to a text file so I could create a log of which workstations the password was changed on, and which ones it wasn’t. That is a good idea so you can keep whittling away at it until the change has been completed on all workstations. Also, you’ll notice that I added the -u and -p switches. You don’t need that if you are already running the script from an account that has permissions to change local passwords.
There are many other little changes you can do as well. I used the set command because I had different lists for different offices. You could just put the computer names in one list and not use the set command.
Let me know if you have used this or a similar product, and perhaps some other scripting ideas for this.
This is one of those articles where you HAVE to read the comments. You guys have some great insights and ideas! Keep on Commenting, that is what makes this site great. Go ahead pat your self on the back!
