After the administrator left a local company Green-Light was called into to regain access to the domain and domain controller. Nothing really malicious occurred here but there were password issues after this staff member left and the organization was left without a local admin password and without the admin password for Active Directory.
Too many organizations find themselves in similar positions at one point or another. I wanted to outline how to recover from this problem.
Attached is a simple script that we’ve made to incorporates the instructions found at Geeks are Sexy. The purpose of this script is to setup a service that will change your domain admin password to ABcd123456.
- Reboot, hit F8 to start in Directory Service Recovery Mode, Login as the Local Admin on the System.
- Download FixPass.zip, Extract and Execute “start.bat”
- The script will setup a service and start a 60 second countdown before rebooting the system.
- When your done your password will be ABcd123456, if you need to change that modify the FixPass.reg file before you run the start.bat script.
**Note: In this particular case we were also locked out of the local admin on the system. Being that the system was running off a RAID controller our handy NT Offline Password tool did not work. A nice side option is to use the Ubuntu Live CD to boot the system. Once started you can download the source for the NT Offline Password tool and run it directly from an ubuntu terminal to reset your local admin.
