Administrator account gets locked out

Have you restarted the services that are logging on using the administrator account? The user/password changes won't take effect until you do this.

You can also enable auditing to identify what is causing the log on failures. In User Manager for Domains, select Audit from the Policies menu, and choose to audit log on success and failure. You can then view this information through the security log in event viewer. Using this information, you should be able to determine what is causing theaccount to become locked out.

The real administrator account is not able to be locked out. Did you change the user name on the administrator account and create another user with the name 'administrator' ? (This is commonly recommended as a security measure, and it works well until somebody forgets that it was done.)

Try turning on auditing for the account in question, watching successful and unsuccessful logins, then watch the security log.

In User Manager for Domains, see which accounts are in the Administrators, Domain Admins, etc., groups. (You should always know this.) Then, under Policies, check which accounts have the ability to log in as a service. These accounts are, or have been, used to start services.

By the way, good practice is to create a serviceaccount for services (one per service) and NOT have them use the administrator account. The service accounts should have 'unguessable' passwords (random letters and digits), and should be set to never expire and not be changeable by the user. Your administrator account should be used by system admins only, and the password should be changed frequently.

I like the post from "RGershbock".

Also, as a long shot, do you use that account to log on to different user's machine ? I have had a situation where users would not notice that I was the last one to log on to their machine, and they would try to log with their password without changing the username

Hope this helps

The way i understand it is that the system when you try to unlock it, it says that the system is now locked you out. First make sure you are only setting up passwords on the domain and not the local machine. If you set up the local machine then you have a good possiblity of locking yourself out.

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