Local Policies in XP Home

[YaMaHaBoB28]

Here's my situation: I connected to a wireless network at my university that requires you install some crap software before it lets you on and it installed some gay restrictions on like passwords and stuff. I have not idea where they are and I've searched the registry and deleted some stuff. Any ideas? It make me have like a cap, number and lower case kinda restrictions.

Thanks

[§nake]

Depends what software the university used, just call their help desk and they should be able to help you sort it out.

[Davis]

XP Home machine's can't be attached to the domain; i'm not sure if they have a GPEditor (never used a home version before). It's not uncommon for RADIUS or TACACS servers to force password policies on any machine connecting to the network, but you'll have to be a bit more specific about which restriction is acually causing you problems before I try to help further.

[Flunk]

Administrative Tools->Local Security Policy

Go to Account Policies->Password Policy

Although changing this may make your system incompatible with the universities network. It's a shame that they just don't use PEAP like the university I went to, you can just connect to that with the Windows wireless networking client.

You might want to upgrade to a more modern version of Windows (9 years old is ancient) if you're going to be using public networks like that, lots of hackers around universities.

[YaMaHaBoB28]

Originally Posted by Flunk

Administrative Tools->Local Security Policy

Go to Account Policies->Password Policy

Although changing this may make your system incompatible with the universities network. It's a shame that they just don't use PEAP like the university I went to, you can just connect to that with the Windows wireless networking client.

You might want to upgrade to a more modern version of Windows (9 years old is ancient) if you're going to be using public networks like that, lots of hackers around universities.

Not available on Home? Yeah, I wish this would work. It's basically the only solution I can find, but I would need XP Pro.

As far as more information on what they used, I'm afriad I'm at a loss. I thought by uninstalling the software I had to install, it would clean up the changes it made. Well, it didn't. I only briefly looked at the config files they had included in the programs file. Here I saw what looked like some strings to be inserted into the registry saying add something along the lines of requiring alphanumeric blah blah blah. Which now I see it probably the root of my problem. If this is as far as I can really take things then I'll just drop it. The security setting are good in a sence, but I repaired this computer for a "customer" and only needed to connect to the network for the fast internet connection to update somethings. I just hope that they don't mind using a complex password from now until the end of time Haha.

Thanks for the help though!

[YaMaHaBoB28]

Originally Posted by §nake

Depends what software the university used, just call their help desk and they should be able to help you sort it out.

Also, the university uses their own ridiculous software. I used to work for them, and we had all kinds of calls from stupid software they had written and required us to install. University of Tennessee can be..."qwuerrrr"

[Flunk]

Interesting idea, have you tried connecting using the Microsoft Management Console from a XP Pro computer to your home system? I know you can access the MMC remotely for a PRO system to a pro system or server but I don't know about home. I suppose I could go turn on my laptop and check... On wait that's Vista Home Premium.

[YaMaHaBoB28]

Originally Posted by Flunk

Interesting idea, have you tried connecting using the Microsoft Management Console from a XP Pro computer to your home system? I know you can access the MMC remotely for a PRO system to a pro system or server but I don't know about home. I suppose I could go turn on my laptop and check... On wait that's Vista Home Premium.

Yes, I, along with a friend, found the setup files online somewhere and installed them along with a few registry files (not sure what all did), and within mmc, I was able to add a few things but not useful it seems. It there a place in the registry where the password complexity requirement is hidden?

[Flunk]

The setting is in the microsoft management console, not the registry. That is pretty much the only way to set it as far as I know. I don't think the security policy is stored in the registry because it's not sufficiently secure.

I know you can set the min password length using the "net" command line utility but I don't think you can set complexity off.