Windows Tip of the Week: Find your account password expiration date in an AD environment

Image of laptop with hand holding a skeleton key extending outwards through the display.

In many cases your enterprise Active Directory will not involve too many domains, in fact it is quite common for an Active Directory implementation to only include one domain.  In some cases, however, when you have the unfortunate situation of having a username in multliple domains with differing policies on password expiration it is useful to be able to know when your password, or that of another user will expire.  Here is an easy way to accomplish this from the command line.

For the current active user

[code language=”bash”]
net user /domain
[/code]

For a different user

[code language=”bash”]
net user /domain _username_here_
[/code]

Here is an example of the output:

[code language=”bash”]
User name afore
Full Name Andrew Fore
Comment
User’s comment
Country code 000 (System Default)
Account active Yes
Account expires Never

Password last set 1/29/2015 4:38:37 PM
Password expires 4/29/2015 4:38:37 PM
Password changeable 1/29/2015 4:38:37 PM
Password required Yes
User may change password Yes

Workstations allowed All
Logon script
User profile
Home directory
Last logon 3/18/2015 3:27:55 PM

Logon hours allowed All

Local Group Memberships
Global Group memberships *VMWare Admins *Domain Users
*Staff
[/code]

If you notice there is a lot of useful information regarding the user account here, but of particular interest in my situation was the value of Password expires since I was trying to ensure that I got my password reset prior to the policy setting so that I would not find myself locked out over the weekend that I went on call when the Helpdesk would be closed.

Solaris Tip of the Week: a better du experience

Graphic showing several nested command line terminal application windows.

In my day job as a Systems Engineer I frequently find myself switching between different UNIX and Linux distributions.  While many of the commands exist on both sides of the aisle, I often find vast differences in the command line parameters that can be consumed by a given command when used in, for example, Linux vs Solaris.

Recently I came upon this again with the need to easily ferret out the majority consumer of drive space on a Solaris 10 system.  While we did have the xpg4 specification support available, the du command was still missing my favorite option “max-depth”.

In Linux I use this to limit the output to only the current directory level so that I don’t have to face to possibility of wading through a tremendously large listing of sub-directories to find the largest directory in the level I am in.  Unfortunately, in Solaris, even with xpg4, the du command doesn’t have this option, so my solution was to pipe the results through egrep and use that to filter out the sub-directories.

Read more

Desktop Google Chrome Reader Mode

If you are a Safari user then you are likely used to the “reader mode” which disables all the extra graphical stuff and focuses the view on the content of the article.  Thanks to a tip from Google Plus user Francois Beaufort, here’s how to enable it on the desktop (in Windows at the very least, I haven’t tried in any other OS).

If you’re on desktop, playing with it is as easy as running chrome with the –enable-dom-distiller switch. Once it’s done, you’ll notice a new “Distill page” menu item.

Hopefully this will make it to mainstream with a nice icon.