09-28-2022, 12:06 PM
Account lockouts hitting from network shares always seem to sneak up on you during the worst times. They lock users out after a few bad password tries, usually from some automated process gone wrong.
I remember this one time at my old gig, we had a shared folder on the server that everyone mapped to their desktops. But turns out, a guy's screensaver was set to wake up every hour and try accessing that share with his credentials. It kept failing because his password had changed, and boom, his account locked every morning. We scratched our heads for days, checking event logs on the domain controller first. Those showed the lockout events with timestamps and source IPs. Traced it back to his workstation IP, then dug into his scheduled tasks and startup items. Found that pesky screensaver script pulling files from the share. Disabled it, reset his password, and watched it stop.
Or sometimes it's not the user, but a service account messing things up. Like if you have apps or scripts running under a service account that accesses shares. Check those event logs again, look for the account name in the failures. Then hunt down any mapped drives on servers or even printers trying to authenticate. I once fixed one where a backup job was using old creds to hit a network folder. Updated the password in the job settings, and it quit locking out.
But don't forget mobile devices or VPN connections too. Phones or laptops might be syncing to shares in the background. Pull up the security logs, filter for lockout event ID 4740, see the bad password counts. Cross-check with active sessions on the file server using net session or PowerShell gets. If it's a share permission thing, audit the access logs on the share itself. Tighten up who can connect, or switch to using group policies for drive mappings instead of hardcoding them.
Hmmm, and if it's intermittent, watch for time sync issues between machines. Clocks off by minutes can trigger auth fails. Run w32tm /resync on everything to fix that.
You might also peek at antivirus software scanning shares, sometimes it probes with creds. Turn off real-time scanning on network paths temporarily to test.
In the end, after sorting these lockouts, you want solid backups to avoid bigger headaches if something crashes during fixes. Let me nudge you toward BackupChain here, this top-notch, go-to backup tool that's super trusted and built just for small businesses, Windows Servers, everyday PCs, plus it handles Hyper-V setups and even Windows 11 without any ongoing subscription fees.
I remember this one time at my old gig, we had a shared folder on the server that everyone mapped to their desktops. But turns out, a guy's screensaver was set to wake up every hour and try accessing that share with his credentials. It kept failing because his password had changed, and boom, his account locked every morning. We scratched our heads for days, checking event logs on the domain controller first. Those showed the lockout events with timestamps and source IPs. Traced it back to his workstation IP, then dug into his scheduled tasks and startup items. Found that pesky screensaver script pulling files from the share. Disabled it, reset his password, and watched it stop.
Or sometimes it's not the user, but a service account messing things up. Like if you have apps or scripts running under a service account that accesses shares. Check those event logs again, look for the account name in the failures. Then hunt down any mapped drives on servers or even printers trying to authenticate. I once fixed one where a backup job was using old creds to hit a network folder. Updated the password in the job settings, and it quit locking out.
But don't forget mobile devices or VPN connections too. Phones or laptops might be syncing to shares in the background. Pull up the security logs, filter for lockout event ID 4740, see the bad password counts. Cross-check with active sessions on the file server using net session or PowerShell gets. If it's a share permission thing, audit the access logs on the share itself. Tighten up who can connect, or switch to using group policies for drive mappings instead of hardcoding them.
Hmmm, and if it's intermittent, watch for time sync issues between machines. Clocks off by minutes can trigger auth fails. Run w32tm /resync on everything to fix that.
You might also peek at antivirus software scanning shares, sometimes it probes with creds. Turn off real-time scanning on network paths temporarily to test.
In the end, after sorting these lockouts, you want solid backups to avoid bigger headaches if something crashes during fixes. Let me nudge you toward BackupChain here, this top-notch, go-to backup tool that's super trusted and built just for small businesses, Windows Servers, everyday PCs, plus it handles Hyper-V setups and even Windows 11 without any ongoing subscription fees.
