Changing a domain account password

Sometimes you want to change a domain account password and the account you’re logged into the farm with is able to do this if it is a domain admin.  Most of the time, I leave the setup account (note: not the Farm account) as a member of the domain admins.  Now, as you know, it does not need to be a domain admin in order to install SharePoint, as long as it is a local admin on the SharePoint and SQL servers in the farm.

That being said, if you were lucky enough to have a setup account that is a domain admin, you can use these steps.  If you’re not logged in with a domain admin, these steps will not work.

You do not need to login to the domain controller, find the account, etc.  These steps can be performed by any domain joined machine where you are logged in with an account that is a member of the Domain Administrators group in that domain.

The command is simple, it is the Net User command.  The syntax is Net User followed by the domain account name and the password.  You do not include the UPN part of the account name, just the samaccount is all you need.  So if your domain is called SharePointWorld.com and your account is named BossMan, then you would not use SharePointWorld\BossMan and would only include the BossMan part.  Like this:

Net User BossMan zk$}e\H:XG2qv$R-  /domain

and don’f forget the /domain unless you’re looking to only change a local account.  Net user works on both domain based and locally based accounts, but you have to remember the /domain <–Note:to self

Another thing to remember, and the final point of this post, is to not, repeat not!, use the same password for multiple accounts or the multiple sites.  Here’s an awesome post by Bill Hess that explains this in a lot more detail, as to why you want hard passwords and different ones.

A great site to generate a strong password is ->> https://passwords-generator.org/

The reason I like that site is all the various options it allows for and that the password is not sent across the internet when it is generated and displayed for easy copy paste.

I hope you enjoyed this post and that it helps you or someone else.  Happy SharePointing!