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Powershell Reset Active Directory Password


How to reset a user account password in Active Directory?

PowerShell can automate resetting of  user accounts password in  Active Directory.

Resetting user account password in Active Directory is quite easy and straight forward.

It will be an easy task if you will be resetting one or two users within a day or a week.

What if there will be a need to reset a bulk of user accounts?

And the bulk of user accounts the password needs to be different from other accounts?

Then it's not fun anymore to reset password one by one, it's a pain on the neck.

Or what if your boss goes to your desk or you receive a call, telling you that I want you  to reset AD user account  password for all the users in this department and I want it now! As in now! Right now!

Then your phone will ring again, I forgot to tell you "don't make the same password  for all the users".

The department that your boss is talking about has 100 employees.

What would be the first thing that would cross your mind?

What the heck did I hear?

Well, Powershell will come to the rescue.

You can tell your boss, game on.

Anyway, here's the Powershell code below that will do the job.

It's only a few lines, but it does what it does; it can simplify the task.

The code needs two input to be ready:

UserResetList.txt - text file that contain list of users to reset the password
UserPasswordList.txt - unique password that will be preset  for all users

So if the UserResetList.txt has this line:
User1
User2
User3

And your UserPasswordList.txt has this line:
U1pwd
xPwdu2
PwdU3x

So User1 will have the password U1pwd and User2 will have the password xPwdu2.

So basically, the user list and password list will match line by line.

If you have 100 lines then line1 user in UserResetlist.txt will have the line 1 password in UserPasswordList.txt.

The other lines will follow;  line2 (UserResetlist.txt)  to line2 (UserPasswordList.txt), line3 to line3 till the end of the line.

Of course, in order to save time you can just export the AD userlist to a text file and create a password text file using Excel VBA to generate random password and save it to a text file also.

Then that's it, a quick and lazy method of doing things. But efficient, reliable and accurate.

After running the Powershell wait for a few seconds and the power of  Powershell will be unleashed.

Here's the code snippet:

=================================

$ResetUserList= Get-Content "D:\UserResetList.txt"
$xUsrPwdList = Get-Content "D:\UserPasswordList.txt"

 $i=0

 while ($i -le 99) {



#line below should be in one line Set-ADAccountPassword -Identity $ResetUserList[$i] -Reset
       -NewPassword (ConvertTo-SecureString -AsPlainText $xUsrPwdList[$i] -Force)

 $i++

 }

=================================

To reset the password in Active Directory for a single user, use this code below:

=================================

$xuser="Active_Use01"
$xUsrPwd="0101AaBb"

Set-ADAccountPassword -Identity $xuser -Reset -NewPassword (ConvertTo-SecureString -AsPlainText $xUsrPwd -Force)

Write-Host "Password Reset Success"

=================================

$xuser - refers to the AD User account (to test replace with the real AD account)
$xUsrPwd - the password for the User Account

To set a single user to reset the password at next logon run this PowerShell code below:

Set-ADUser -Identity  Domain_Name\AD_UserName -ChangePasswordAtLogon $true

Once the user logon, after entering his/her password system will prompt to enter a new password.

-ChangePasswordAtLogon is equivalent to ticking the option on AD GUI to "Change Password At Next Logon"


Cheers!!! Hope it helps...


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Comments

  1. Jhon DrakeSeptember 23, 2014 at 3:25 AM

    This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Sirch_wiredSeptember 23, 2014 at 11:13 PM

    Hi John, great software ideal in a large environment but to a small enterprise I think a PowerShell can do the job.

    ReplyDelete

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