Cisco Vpn Password Issues

this looked like a neat idea also:

I?m not the only person plagued by VPN woes. Marvin Adeff recently wrote to me about an issue he was having with his remote users: ?I?ve been racking my mind trying to come up with a script that remote users can run on their client laptops, which will allow them to change their passwords...?

It seems that Marvin has several remote users who go long periods of time without being directly connected to the office network (sometimes as long as a year). Like any good administrator, Marvin has a mandatory password expiration policy in place on the network. Regrettably, his users log onto their laptops using local, not domain, accounts. They?re authenticated on the domain by connecting to a stand-alone concentrator, which only performs authentication; it doesn?t support changing passwords. Consequently, when his users? passwords expire, they have no way of changing them.

Marvin wanted a way to help facilitate this via a script. Indeed, you can script password changes via Active Directory Service Interfaces (ADSI), but the user running the script needs the appropriate administrative permissions?not a good idea for a remote user. The ?least bad? solution in his case is to have an intranet server running a Web page that allows the users to change their domain passwords. They can access this Web server via the VPN, so there?s a reasonable level of security. Better yet, make those laptops members of the domain. This negates the need for a separate concentrator to authenticate domain credentials. It also provides better security, in general, for the laptops.