Easy Password Reset Software

[maniac]

Several people expressed an interest in this, so I hope it's OK to release it here.

 

Easy Password Reset is a small .NET utility written by me that allows anyone to easily reset student passwords (Providing they have the correct permissions in your AD schema of course)

 

I have tested it on 2 different networks, and it works well on both of them, so hopefully it will also work for others.

 

What does it do?

Allows staff to easily reset student passwords with a few clicks of the mouse, no difficult interface or risk of them being able to reset staff users passwords or simelar.

 

What do I need to run it?

The program requires .NET 2.0 to run, and correct permissions on AD to allow the person using it to change passwords.

 

How do I install it

I've provided just the .EXE file in a ZIP file below. Unzip to a suitable location and run. It will not run from a network drive, but that's a limitation of .NET and not the program. I think there is a hack somewhere to allow .NET programs to run from network shares, but I've never looked that deeply into it.

 

How does it work?

The program automatically binds to your AD using LDAP to retrieve a list of users, no settings to program in as it finds them all out at runtime. It filters the users based on the 'standard' prefix of year of entry so it will pick up any users beginning with 08,07,06,05,04,03 and 02 covering all year groups from Year 7 to Year 13. (I will do a primary version if anyone asks as it's pretty easy to modify the code for that.) It doesn't matter what AD containers your users are in, the program searches the whole directory quickly and displays a list for the year group you select from the front screen.

 

You simply select a user, and click reset password. The password is reset by default to 'password1' but there is a text box where you can choose a different one if you want to. Also by default the option for 'change password at next logon' is set as well. (I will write a feature into the program to select this at runtime if people would like it, but for now it does it to all password resets as that's what we do in our school, and it's good practise anyway.)

 

Using this utility there's no danger of staff being able to reset passwords they shouldn't unless you have other users with the above prefixes.

 

What if I use a different username pattern?

Then this utility isn't for you. I wrote it for my school where we do use that pattern, and most other schools I have come across also do, so it should serve most peoples needs.

 

What about next year when the year groups move up a year, will I need to update it?

No you won't as the program calculates the year group prefixes depending on the date. It rolls over on the 1st September automatically.

 

I hope some of you find it useful, and any questions please feel free to ask. I have been sucessfully using it in my school for a while now, and in a previous school for over a year.

 

The program is released without any sort of warrenty, if you can't get it to work I can only offer limited support for it as it was a personal project that I thought others may find useful.

 

Many thanks,

 

Mike.

Edited September 17, 2008 by maniac

[john]

Sounds a great tool to me, will give it a whurl

[machin05]

Is it possible to change the standard prefix?

Our students dont have the 0. They start with 8 or 7 or 6 etc.

 

Cheers,

Will

[mattmoo]

This is a great idea however, all our students have firstname.surname and so is not as useful unless of course you can post the source code.

 

It would be better for me if i could just let it get all the usernames from an OU and its sub containers as i have a student OU.

 

Let me know if you could release a version like this or let me have a look at the source code.

 

Thanks

 

Matt

[machin05]

Yeah, I have all my students in seperate OU's depending on year group so being able to have customizable settings would be massive bonus.

[maniac]

I'll see what I can do. The idea was to keep the program simple and thus no settings to program in, but I know the script I've used as part of my program has the ability to read groups and OU information as well as usernames so it might be a fairly easy to change to make.

 

I will add however that this program is a personal project that I've decided to make available to other people who might want to use it, and as such I'm not going to spend a lot of time improving it, as it serves the origenal purpose I designed it for well.

 

Mike.

[nadeem]

sounds quite interesting - I'll see if that has any use for me

[EduTech]

Kwl.. I currently use Password Control from WiseSoft.. does the job and works accross the network. so if someone would rather it be run over the network take a look at that also.

 

Cheers Maniac

 

James.

[Ch3rub]

It was a long time since last post here but hopefully sombody will have a look

 

EduTach how did you manage to make Password Control from WiseSoft work across the network? I tried to simply share the apps folder but it fails to start the program (tried different users with different level permissions and it fails every time).

 

Help would be greatly appreciated

[maniac]

I've added a few extra bits to my program since I posted the first version.

 

• There's a facility for setting a runtime password for a bit of extra security
  
• There's a way of getting it to display users in a particular OU instead of the default way it is setup
  
• You can now choose the default settings yourself, and decide if change password at next login is applied or not.
  
• It now reads the SAMAccountName field rather than the cn field when searching for users in active directory.

 

And some other changes. Please note the custom settings bit doesn't work yet as I've not written the code for it, but it won't be long until it does.

 

Any feedback welcome, we're using it quite happily in our school at the moment and it's working well.

[sippo]

Quick question- can you add this to a shared drive and have a shortcut or does it have to be 'locally hosted' on each PC? I can't seem to get it to work on a shared mapped drive.

 

Good software though!

[maniac]

Quick question- can you add this to a shared drive and have a shortcut or does it have to be 'locally hosted' on each PC? I can't seem to get it to work on a shared mapped drive.

 

Good software though!

 

It's written in VB.NET 2008 and I believe there are issues running .NET programs from shared drives, however it works for me running it from a shared drive, but doesn't on some of our other machines, and I've not worked out why yet!

 

Mike.

[sippo]

We've got mandatory profiles here, if I put it on the desktop locally on a PC it doesn't retain the settings ie, the OU. I can ask the teachers to put it in as they wouldn't have a clue!!

 

Any suggestions?

[maniac]

We've got mandatory profiles here, if I put it on the desktop locally on a PC it doesn't retain the settings ie, the OU. I can ask the teachers to put it in as they wouldn't have a clue!!

 

Any suggestions?

 

Ah, that will be because by default if you use the built in part of VB.NET that allows you ro save settings, like I have with this, it saves it in part of the user profile. If you add that file to the mandatory profile it should pick up the settings from there. If it doesn't let me know, and I may change the way it saves settings to a file in the same directory as the executable, it's just a bit more work to program it like that.

 

It's an XML file, and is located in a directory called

 

C:\Documents and Settings\userprofile\Local Settings\Application Data\mike_redman

 

unfortunitely it's used my name for some reason, it must be programmed into VB.NET somewhere. I think I'll try and change that for the next release.

 

There's also a bug on the save settings where it always expects there to be something in the OU field, if you're not using that setting, just put a . in or something, it will then save settings properly. I'll correct this in the next version as well.

 

Mike.

[AWicher]

Just been informed by IT staff that the year 7's are not showing up (only taken 4 months), I will assume its todo with the 10 in username. Any plans to fix this?

[maniac]

I'm not sure if the version I'm using is the same as the version on this site. I did correct various bugs, but I'd totally forgotten I'd published it here.

 

I've attached the latest version I have which works for our year7 users, so let me know if it works.

 

Mike.

 

[ATTACH]9008[/ATTACH]

[AWicher]

Thank you! Working with years 7 now!

[JamesG]

looks like a great tool

 

however our students use the year they joined, eg. 98JoSmith for a year 11 student

[maniac]

looks like a great tool

 

however our students use the year they joined, eg. 98JoSmith for a year 11 student

 

Your school presumably takes the students all the way from Year1 right up to year 11 then because most secondarys at the moment a Year11 student would have joined in 2006.

 

This scinario is what the 'custom settings' section of the settings box will help resolve, except I've not written the code for that yet. I'm not even sure if I still have the source code for the project actually, as I lost a lot of data on my home PC a while back and I have a nasty feeling this program was one of the things I lost. If I can find the source code however I'll try and write the section to handle the custom settings, then you may be able to use the software.

 

Mike.

[meastaugh1]

Any idea why the sixth form button returns all 04 and 05 students in v1, but only 05 students in v2? Thanks

[maniac]

Any idea why the sixth form button returns all 04 and 05 students in v1, but only 05 students in v2? Thanks

 

Because I messed up the code slightly in the latest version and didn't realise. We don't have a 6th form here which is why I didn't notice, but it was pointed out to me by another school a while back.

 

Unfortunitely I've lost the source code for this program since I wrote it, so I can no longer make any changes or improvements to it, so if it doesn't work for you there's little I can do to correct any faults. In a majority of situations the software does work - the only faults I'm aware of are the custom settings part was never written to a working standard and the 'upper sixth' users don't display in the program anywhere. In all other respects the program works.

 

If anyone has a way of de-compiling a program writtin in VB.NET 2008 please let me know, then I might be able to carry on where I left of with this - the idea of re-writing the entire thing does not appeal.

 

Mike.

Edited March 10, 2011 by maniac

[meastaugh1]

I saw your message about the lost code, I didn't realise the missing y13 (upper sixth form) was a known issue, that's fine. Thanks for getting back so quickly.

[maniac]

I saw your message about the lost code, I didn't realise the missing y13 (upper sixth form) was a known issue, that's fine. Thanks for getting back so quickly.

 

Not a problem, I hadn't mentioned that problem anywhere on this thread so you wern't to know.

 

The reason it doesn't display the upper 6th is because for each button I simply copied and pasted the Year 7 code and changed the values for the search accordingly, forgetting that the 6th form spans 2 intake years. If I still had the code I could correct this very easily.

 

Mike.

[maniac]

I've managed to dig up the code for this project from an old backup, so I've made a few updates to the program.

 

* Fixed the problem with it only displaying Year 12 on the year 12/13 button

* Fixed the problem on the settings screen with the program always expecting something in the 'OU' field even when it wasn't needed

* Sort of fixed the focus on the password box if you choose to password protect the program (It appears at the front, but not as the focus, but it does stop it being hidden behind the program which was happening)

* It no longer creates a txt file when you run the program - this was a legacy left from one of the script examples I used when I first wrote the program

* Settings are no longer available from a button within the program to make it more difficult to alter them. You can change the program settings using the arguement /S when running the program to bring up the settings box - I may change this back, but certainly in my school I've had a few teachers fiddle with the settings when I'd rather they didn't.

 

I'm afraid if you have changed settings in the old program, this new verion won't remember them as I've managed to change the settings location from using my name to using easy_password_reset as the directory in the user profile. In theory if you copied the settings file to the new directory, it should read it from there, but it might be easier to just program the settings again.

 

The 'full cutomisation' option is still not available, I'm working on the code for this at the moment. Other features I will write in if people want to request them.

 

Incidentally, how many people are actually using this program - be interested to know?

 

Mike.

 

Easy Password Reset 2.0.zip

 

Oh and the version number is 2.2 now, but I forgot to rename the .exe

Edited March 11, 2011 by maniac

[meastaugh1]

That's great, thanks Mike.