[Samba] tmp-admin-pwreset.pl - temporary administrative password reset tool

[Henry Van Styn]

I have written a Samba administrative perl script that I wanted to share with the community.

We use Samba3 with a tdbsam backend (set to be synchronized with the UNIX password database). Our users are Windows XP clients with roaming profiles. During the course of supporting our users, our techs frequently need to login *as* specific users to work on their windows profile, such as Outlook profile settings, check out their user specific problem reports, etc. The trouble is that if we don't know their password (which we don't generally want to know) we have to change their password, and then somehow alert them to the new password so that they can login and reset their password when they get back to their PC after we've worked on it.

This has been a cumbersome problem for us for a while, and to solve it, I finally wrote tmp-admin-pwreset.pl. What it does is simple: you pass it a list of usernames and a temporary password. It will reset the password of all the supplied users (Samba and UNIX) to the temporary password, but first will backup the current password *hashes* for each of the users to a file, so that they can be reset to their original values later on. You then call the script in another mode ("--restore") and it sets all the password hashes for both UNIX and Samba to what they were originally.

This effectively allows administrators to be able login as specific users without knowing their password, and without having to change their password either. Users won't even know anything changed at all (and won't call the helpdesk because they can't login; didn't see the note, didn't listen to the voicemail, etc).

I wrote this for our own use, however, I thought it might be useful to others, so I am sharing it.

If anyone is interested, the script and documentation can be downloaded here:

http://devzone.intellitree.com/projects/tmp-admin-pwreset

Best regards,

Henry Van Styn
IntelliTree Solutions llc
http://www.intellitree.com