I had a long power outage yesterday that caused my servers to shut down. While they are on UPS’s, 5 hours or so without power ran ‘em dry. When I tried to hook my desktops up to them after the outage, I couldn’t access the shares one of the servers. I kept getting an error telling me that my account was locked out. When I used Remote Desktop to login to the server (with the administrator’s account), the accounts were indeed, locked.

After playing around for a while and searching for a solution on the net, I ran into a reference to a solution to a similar problem that was whacky enough to give a try. As it turns out, the clock on my server had not updated itself for some reason and, in fact, had been reset to some date in 2007. Once I updated the clock on the server to the correct date and time and reset the lock status of the account, I had no more difficulties. Apparently, this is a security feature. I just wish it had been a bit easier to diagnose.