Solutions for the management and administration of Windows Active Directory

How to copy user account passwords between Windows servers or stations?

What exactly does transferring user passwords mean?

I use IDEAL Administration 4.51 and I'm just wondering what the exact purpose is of the "Transfer user passwords" checkbox in the "Add/Modify user accounts" window. Even when I uncheck this box, IA still tries to assign a password to the user and it conflicts with the security rules defined for my domain.

Can you enlighten me a little here?

Yes, this does appear to be rather an ambiguous option. In fact, what we should have said was "Transfer password hashes", i.e., transfer passwords in LANMAN and MD4 formats.

These hashes are present in .ACT files when users are retrieved by IDEAL Administration using the "Advanced Mode"/"Retrieve user accounts" option. They are present as character strings on the "password_lanman" and "password_md4" lines.

If you do not check this box, IDEAL Administration will first create users with an "empty" password then try to assign them the unencrypted password that you typed in on the "password" line.

For this option to work correctly, the minimum password length requirement must not be activated during this operation, neither at the server nor domain levels.
If the option is active, you might well find yourself with a message such as "Impossible to add user account YourAccount (L5); check your access permissions and the type of computer, or make sure the computer is still present!"