Expire an Active Directory users' account password

password expiration is set through the domain security policy manager ( not the domain controller security policy manager ) under account policy -> password policy.although it will set it for the entire domain not a specific user. I am not sure it is setable on a per user basis.

Mark

Mark is correct, this is done in the domain security policy. The default is 42 days. You can exempt certian user accounts from  having the password expire by selecting the 'Password does not expire' option in the user account but other than this you cannot set different time periods for different users.
Note that unlike many GPO settinfs different OUs cannot have different password policies - this is a domain level setting.

Would it be possible through a script to reset the password?

Moderator:   Can this question be added to Programming > Languages > Visual Basic > VB Scripting ?

Thanks,

Its handled by the pwdLastSet attribute.

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/scriptcenter/resources/qanda/jul05/hey0706.mspx

Sorry, I've re-read your request and the link that I posted and realised that the posted link doesn't _quite_ meet the requirement. Expired passwords are detected when the pwdLastSet attribute is either 0 or when the attribute contains a date that is greater than the domain security policy allows.

Unfortunately, pwdlastset uses a special date format involving the number of nano seconds since Jan 1, 1601.
Therefore, to simulate a natural password expiry, you would change an account's pwdlastset to x days in the past. I've found a link [1] that describes the logic but it doesn't use VBscript. There are 86400000 nanoseconds in a day so you could  use that to calculate a date in the past.



[1] http://www.irishdev.com/blogs/jbrennan/archive/2005/09/02/973.aspx

You can use the following scriptlet to populate a selected user's pwdlastset attribute.

DaysAgo = "-45"
dtmAdjusted = DateAdd("d", DaysAgo, Now())

' Find number of seconds since 1/1/1601.
lngSeconds = DateDiff("s", #1/1/1601#, dtmAdjusted)

' Convert the number of seconds to a string
' and convert to 100-nanosecond intervals.
str64Bit = CStr(lngSeconds) & "0000000"
Wscript.Echo "Integer8 value: " & str64Bit

(Thanks to Richard Mueller http://www.rlmueller.net/Programs/DateToInteger8.txt)

ryan~  i'm kind of dump founded when it comes to script writing... how do I associate this script with a user?