Recipe16.5.Troubleshooting Account Lockout Problems

Recipe 16.5. Troubleshooting Account Lockout Problems

Problem

A user is having account lockout problems and you need to determine where it is getting locked from and how he or she is getting locked out.

Solution

Using a graphical user interface

LockoutStatus is a new tool available for Windows 2000 or Windows Server 2003 that can help identify which domain controllers are locking out users. It works by querying the lockout status of a user against all domain controllers in the user's domain.

To determine the lockout status of a user, open LockoutStatus and select File OK. At this point, each domain controller in the domain will be queried and the results will be displayed.

Discussion

The Lockoutstatus.exe tool is just one of many that are available in the new "Account Lockout and Management" tool set provided by Microsoft. These new lockout tools are intended to help administrators with account lockout problems that are very difficult to troubleshoot given the tools available under Windows 2000. Along with the tool mentioned in the Solution, here are a few others that are included in the set:

ALockout.dll: A script that uses this DLL is included that can enable logging of application authentication, which can point out if an application is using bad credentials that cause account lockouts.
ALoInfo.exe: Displays services and shares that are using a particular account name. It can also print all the users and their password age.
NLParse.exe: Filter tool for the netlogon.log files. You can use it to extract just the lines that relate to account lockout information.

All of the new Account Lockout tools can be downloaded from:

http://microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=7AF2E69C-91F3-4E63-8629-B999ADDE0B9E&displaylang=en.