Instead of working, I blog.

Last week I somehow forgot the domain admin acct in my lab. I tried for 3 days to remember it and I finally came to the realization that I just wasn't going to. So I started looking around on the web for different things I could do. I wasn't really in a hurry cause my domain was running just fine.

I found many methods for changing the local admin acct, but not many for changing the domain admin acct in a windows 2003 domain controller. I did find this method here.

Anyway, I checked with an SE friend of mine on the windows support team at MS and he said that was a good method and told me to run with that one. Not that I minded, but I just didn't want to bring down my DC and take the time to copy all that stuff to floppy, etc. So I kept looking.

I finally had an idea that I just had to share with everybody. It's so simple it's scary.
I used the SysInternals tool psexec.exe. What it does is run programs remotely on the box of your choosing. The problem of course, is that you have to make an admin connection to that box, and if you could do that, you wouldn't have to use psexec to reset the password. So I looked at the help file for psexec and found a parameter that just amazed me. -s is its name.
What that does is tells psexec to connect with the local system acct of the remote box. And since the local system acct has full admin rights, you have the rights you need to change the admin password.

So at a command prompt go to the dir where you have psexec and type the following command:
psexec.exe -s \\machinename cmd
That tells you to bring up a command shell on the remote box and log in as the machine's local system acct. So now you've got a shell open on your box just like you were standing in front of the console on the remote box. Now you just type the command for changing the admin password: net user administrator newpassword

That's it. It's simple, elegant, beautiful, and it really saved my ass.
I hope this helps someone else.

Just for grins, here's a Camtasia I made of the process just to make it even easier. Click here





UPDATE:
Here's an update to my original post. I sent this solution to a friend at MS and he found that it didn't work for him. After a little investigation, I discovered that it worked for me because I had the admin share on my DC mapped on my box and PSExec was using that IPC. You can read more about that here.

Wow... I really don't get a chance to write in this blog very often because my company has been blocking the address. For some reason though, they just opened it up so I'll be writing here a lot more. So lookout, I'm back.

Man, you ever have one of those customers who gives you Tourette's for like a week? You know the one I mean... he calls you up with something ridiculous he's promised a customer and it falls to you to get it done, only it's a month-long task that he's promised in 12 days. Or the one who keeps getting you out of bed because he won't quit monkeying around in the system and he keeps deleting the wrong data and you have to recover every 3 days.
And what do you do when that happens? You walk around for a week muttering obsenities to yourself. You find yourself telling him off in the shower. You see his face in stop signs. You hear his voice asking for a restore every night just as you fall asleep. Then you wake up and mutter more obscenities to yourself. He's like a bad song. Those of you who are parents, you know what I'm talking about. How often have you tried to not hear the Oobi theme song in your head, or that god-awful map song from Dora?

Oddly enough, I just finished a bout of Tourette's myself. I'm not going to go into the details, but it's something that got me muttering for over a week. Now I'm feeling much better and back to the good ole days falling asleep to the Oobi theme.

I think it should be easier to find the service packs on the SQL site. There used to be a link on the front page, and then it moved to the download page. Now you have to search for it and it does eventually take you to the download page, but it's not easy to find like it used to be.

I think I actually found it this time by accident looking at an article for SP hotfixes... and that had a link to the SP2 download page. Come on MS, make it easy for us to find these things, and let us know the last time the SP was refreshed.

OK, so here's the SP2 page for Yukon. I found it from the SQL Support page here.