Change Password on Evan Hoffman

Setting user Postgres passwords via MD5

Wed, 12 Feb 2014 11:06:07 +0000

Say you want to create a Postgres account for a user but you don’t want them to have to reset it after logging in, and you don’t want to do the “come type in a password on my computer” routine. Well, here’s one way around this.

Have the user generate an MD5 of their password on their local computer. Postgres uses the username as the salt for the hash, so the command to generate the md5 on a Mac would be (assuming a username of ’ehoffman’ and a password of ‘abcdefg’):

Changing Active Directory Password in Browser through OWA 2010

Thu, 05 Aug 2010 11:29:41 +0000

A few months ago I was on a quest to figure out how to change my Active Directory password via a browser (for Linux/Mac users). I finally figured it out, but since I’ve been working on this Exchange 2010 migration I noticed one of the features of OWA (Outlook Web App) in Exchange 2010 is that you can change the AD password right in the browser from within the app:

Victory! Change Active Directory Password via LDAP through browser

Wed, 13 Jan 2010 13:51:43 +0000

I had to give up on PHP and go to Perl, but it turned out not to be so bad. Users can now change their Active Directory passwords via a self-service web page that doesn’t require admin credentials. The Perl code is below. Authentication to the script is done via .htaccess LDAP authentication, so the REMOTE_USER env variable is assumed to contain the user’s username (sAMAccountName) by the time this script is called. There is a simple check for $ENV{HTTPS} to ensure the script is called via SSL, and AD requires password changes to be done via ldaps, so the whole thing should be encrypted end to end.