Tag Archives: os

Disable password ageing on Windows 2008 Server Standard

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Password ageing in Windows 2008 Server Standard edition (the one I generally use) is set to automatically requre passwords to be changed after 42 days…obviously a Douglas Adams fan responsible for that bit of the codebase!

NOTE – I don’t have access to other version of Windows Server (2003 or 2008) so I can’t speak for them, but I imagine it’s the same on them too.

That’s annoying for home use, where I have tons of VMs for research that I use periodically, so I asked my brother Steve how to stop this happening and he gave me some simple instructions…

First start the Local Security Policy editor by typing secpol.msc in the start/run box..

secpol.msc

and then select Account Policies / Password Policy on the nagivation tree on the left. On the right hand side select Maximum Password Age and set this from the default of “42″ to “0″. You’ll notice it now says “Password will not expire” above the value “0″.

Set Password Ageing off.msc

Seems to have done the trick.

Kinda handy having a brother who’s an MCSE and a VCP too. Useful when I get stuck with OS or VM stuff for my Oracle research!

By the way, if anyone happens to be looking for some skilled contract resource in the Virtualisation field (VMWare, ESX Server etc…) then Steve has just become available…please feel free to contact me, or Steve, via his website

OS trials and tribulations

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I got tired of my apps not working on 64 bit Vista so I figured I’d bin the dual boot Vista 64 and Enterprise Linux 5 and just go Linux. EL5 wasn’t up to date (kernel wise) and I was unable to easily bring it up to date, without paying Oracle a licence fee, so I figured I’d just used Fedora 9 instead.

Then I saw this from Tim on ESX and I figured that sounded like a good idea…so I spent some time trying to get that working…only to realise that ESX needs SCSI for the disks (or one of the very specific SATA interfaces – that I don’t have)…so that idea also ground to a halt. ESXi, being more restrictive than ESX on hardware compatability, didn’t even install, whilst ESX managed to install after a bit of effort, but I couldn’t create any VMFS filesystems – that’s when I RTFM’d that it was not going to work without SCSI – even after much surfing travels.

I do hope that they get ESX to work with more SATA (i.e. mine) so I can use it…seemed like a good idea for my home research requirements. Never mind, will have to manage with Fedora 9 for now.

I’ve got Fedora 9 installed now and it was reasonably painless, except that the networking wasn’t working when it booted up – no access to the internet. After a bit of surfing, I found the website of Mauriat Miranda, who seems to have some great stuff, including an installation guide for Fedora 9, which covers the fix to my networking issue.

Big thanks to Mauriat there.