Administrator auditing

[thecoldone06]

Does anyone know how to find programs that are hitting my domain administrator account? For instance, I have a program that need authentication and when it was setup, someone used the domain administrator. Now when I must change the admin password, I have no idea what else is going to break when i do. Is there a way I can find out what is using it before I just change it and see what breaks?

[techsupport]

A good place to start is Administrative Tools -----> Services, then sort by Log on As. Hopefully most of your services are set to use the local system account, local service or network service accounts. You may find some services are set to the use the Administrative Account. This is where you would change the password, or even better, change the account that the service uses.

[thecoldone06]

Thank you for the reply techsupport. Most of my services are run by local system but there are a few that are using admin however I know i have to change those. I'm looking for things like backup exec (formerly by Veritas) that are using my admin account but if I didn't know it would break if i changed it. The company I work for had all this stuff setup before I got here and now its a big headache for me since we have to change the admin password now. :(

[techsupport]

How about trying a search through the registry (just the software section) on each of your servers that houses business line applications and see what you find?

[thecoldone06]

How about trying a search through the registry (just the software section) on each of your servers that houses business line applications and see what you find?

Thats a good idea. I'll give that a try. Thanks very much!

[Holzster]

Try Process Explorer

download link:
http://www.snapfiles.com/get/processexplorer.html