“How is a Windows Domain like a cult?”, Kevin asked me far to late in the night for him to still be awake (midday for me!).

“Oh dear…”, I muttered in reply.

“If you join one you loose your identity, and if you try to leave you’re screwed.”

If you got that joke, or even still care, kudos to you. Otherwise, abandon all hope at the door.

In a gregarious act of ignorance, truely the source of most of my computer problems, I removed a computer from a network domain without reseting the password for the local computer’s non-domain admin account. Ugg.

Sort of funny – I am the one who is supposed to know everything, and what do I do? In a coun try without any resources, no reliable internet connection, not even a Windows CD to rebuild the machine with, I lock myself in a digital room and throw away the key. To make matters worse, I did this all in the few seconds it took while leaning over an engineers shoulder. He got a long lunch.

Windows has tight security, and everything I found to break password was either hundreds of dollars, or non-existant. And then:

http://home.eunet.no/~pnordahl/ntpasswd/

It is a linux based boot disk that will fork into the user accounts on a Windows computer and let you change anything. Got to love that windows security. Take that Kevin!