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Account LockOut in Windows 2000

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A limited number of our users have two PC's (one in the office and one at home) that they use for accessing the company systems. Whenever these users change their domain passwords from one of their PC's their domain account suddently starts gettingdisabled. I keep enabling the accounts, but 10 minutes later I look in Active Directory User and Computers and see that the accounts have been disabled again. This only seems to happen to staff that access the system from multiple PC's. Anyone have any ideas as to what could be causing this problem.

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by joseph moore

Since they have 2 different machines that are connecting to your AD domain, when they change their domain account's password on one machine, the other machine must still be connected using the now old password. And as their old machine attempts connections, they are failing (again, due to the old password). The machines could have a Service configured to use the user account to run, instead of the Local System account. Or, there could be Scheduled Job(s) set to run, using the user account for authentication. Either way, they are connecting from the other machine with the now "old" password.
Your AD domain must be running account policies that limit the number of failed login attempts before the accounts get locked out.
Check the Group Policies (Active Directory Users & Computers -> right click on your domain -> Properties -> Group Policy tab -> Edit whatever policy is in there -> Computer Configuration -> Windows Settings -> Security Settings -> Account Policies -> Account Lockout Policy ->Account Lockout Threshold!!!)
See what value is in there. The default is 0 (to disable the setting) but I bet you have a higher value in there, like 3 or so.
What you can do is change this setting to 0 to turn off this setting. Then, republish the GP, and that should take care of it.
Now, you have to decide IF you even want to do that! It is good, from a security, to enable the Account Lockout Threshold. If disabled, a dictionary attack from a remote evil person could be done until access is granted! And you don't want that.

by joseph moore

The best way, IMHO, is to audit login events, and then to train your users to log out from one machine when they are not there. This way, if they are only logged in from one machine, this problem can't happen. I realize that training users is near impossible, so that is why you audit logins. That way, you could check your Security logs on your DC, and see from what machine the user is still logged in from. You could then run a tool like SHUTDOWN.EXE from the Resource Kit to do a remote logoff.
hope this helps

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