Unable to change password

[danIT]

WE have around 30 Power Macs that are all stand alone in music. Basically we have a number of accounts on all of the machines and one admin account which manages all those accounts on each machine. We have parental controls enabled to stop them messing about with system properties etc...

We've just started the new year and need to reset the year 11 account password on each machine, we log on as ADMIN and go to accounts, reset password, enter the password twice to verify, everything seems to work, log out of admin, login as year 11 user and it doesnt accept the new password, any ideas???

Dan

[Roberto]

Rather than spending ages trying to fix this, might it not be easier to backup the account data, create a new account and restore the data...

Can you change the account's password when logged on with the account itself?

[danIT]

we cant even delete the user account from the account management screen?

whats going on there? its like any changes we make as admin just get reversed? we uncheck a box and log out and back in its rechecked?

[Geoff]

sounds like somethings corrupted.

[Roberto]

we cant even delete the user account from the account management screen?

whats going on there? its like any changes we make as admin just get reversed? we uncheck a box and log out and back in its rechecked?

First things first, what happens if you open disk utility and choose to repair permissions on the OS disk?

[LeoMJ]

Your Netinfo Databse is corrupt ->/var/db/netinfo (it's invisible so press cmd+g and type /var to enter the folder, or use terminal)
Firstly try booting from cd to reset the password, if this doesn't help you've got a slightly bigger problem.
It might be that yhe machine has it's search order for authentification worng, have a loog in Applications/Utilities/Directory Access and check that the LDAPv3 is not ticked (as you're net using a directory system). If this is working move the Library/Prefernces/com.apple.DirectoryService.plist to the desktop and reboot. This will reset all bindings while retaing the settings so you can resurect them. Reboot and see what happens.....
Failing this, take one machine and perform and archive and install from disk OS disk, which will replace the core parts of the OS that deal with authentication.

Good Luck