WIN 2003 TFTP Password

When our diskless nodes stopped booting from the server today, we restarted the server and after that we found that the TFTP service was stopped. (You can learn how to restart TFTP service here). This was the first reboot we had done after changing the administrator password on the WIN 2003 server. When we tried to restart the service, we got the error:
Could not start the terminal FTP Daemon service on local computer. Error 1069: Service did not start due to login failure.

At first, we just changed the password back to the old one and got it to work. Read more here.
 
On playing around some more, we found that the user name and password are stored in the services itself.
(Click on Start button, click on Administrative tools, click on Services, scroll down till you find Trivial FTP Daemon, double click on it, click on the "Logon" tab and you will find the administrator user name and the password. This is why the service would not start; the administrator password was changed and it was not changed for this service here. So if you are using TFTP with your WIN 2003 server, make sure you remember to change the WIN 2003 administrator password in both these places.

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Windows 2003 Password Policy

While attempting to change the administrator password on WIN 2003 you might get the fillowing error; in such cases you might need to alter your password policy.

Error : Windows cannot set the password for <so-and-so user>  because: The password does not meet the password policy requirements. Check the minimum password length, password complexity and password history requirements.
 
To relax the Win 2003 password policy or password restrictions we  made the necessary changes ((Click on Start button, click on Administrative tools, click on Security Settings, click on Account Policies, click on Password Policy.

 For each of the parameters on the right, double click on each one and uncheck "Define this policy setting".
Next go to the command prompt (Click Start button, click on Run and type cmd in the window that pops up and click on OK).

Then type gpupdate /force so that the changes take effect.


To return to Windows, type exit and hit Enter key.

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Changing Administrator Password on WIN 2003 Server

If you are looking to change the administrator password on WIN 2003 server, do the following:
Click Start button, click on Administrative Tools, click on Active directory Users and Computer, Scroll to the bottom on the left, click on Users, click on Administrator on the right side right at the top, right click and then click on Reset Password.

While changing the password, if you get an error message like the following, see how to resolve it here.
Windows cannot set the password for <so-and-so user>  because: The password does not meet the password policy requirements. Check the minimum password length, password complexity and password history requirements.

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WIN 2003 - Diskless nodes not booting

Today we had a strange problem; the diskless nodes were not booting into our WIN 2003 server. On scrutiny it was found that the TFTP service was not started.
If you don't know how to restart the TFTP Daemon service, (Click on Start button, click on Administrative tools, click on Services, scroll down till you find Trivial FTP Daemon, right click on it and click on Start)
But we got an error like : Could not start the terminal FTP Daemon service on local computer. Error 1069: Service did not start due to login failure.

We did change the WIN 2003 server password a few days earlier. Because the error mentioned something about login failure we suspected it might be the new password that was causing the problem so we tried to change the password back. But meanwhile after installing the server we had changed the password policy so we were now getting this error while attempting to change the password back to the old one:
Windows cannot set the password for <so-and-so user>  because: The password does not meet the password policy requirements. Check the minimum password length, password complexity and password history requirements.

Learn how to relax the password restrictions on WIN 2003 here.

Now you can change the administrator password. If you don't know how, click here.

Now try restarting the TFTP Daemon service.

It worked for us but how it was linked to the old password we still have to find out! Watch out for a later post...this one!

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