Guidelines for changing Master Admin Password

I am running WINNT 4.0 Server, Exchange 5.5 and various 3rd party applications (Diskkeeper, NAV Corp Ed, Veritas Net BackUp...) and need to change my Master Admin Password, which is also the service account for Exchange, and the Lord knows what else. Needless to say, I am a little hesitant because I'm not sure what applications and services will "break" when this change is performed. Is there a guideline or checklist available that will help me accomplish this task in order to alleviate potential problems and anticipated downtime?

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I feel your pain. It's a hassle to keep up with the service accounts. Here's a short piece of Vbscript that will list the services on a machine and their service accounts. You can pick out the services that have service accounts other than 'LocalSystem' and change the passwords in those accounts.

BTW, there's a bug in ADSI that prevents resetting the passwords. You can use WMI on a Windows 2000 machine but since you have an NT server, you would have to install the WMI driver from the SP4 CD (It's not on any other service pack CD.) It would take less time to change the passwords manually.

When you run the script, replace the angle braces with the computer name and delete the quote at the beginning of the line. For example, computername = BlueServer1

 'computername = [insert computer name here] set obj = getobject("WinNT://" & computername) obj.filter = array("service") for each item in obj wscript.echo item.name & ", " & item.serviceaccountname next

This was first published in February 2001

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