Creating Fine Grained Password Policies

Prajwal Desai
Posted by Prajwal Desai

Creating Fine Grained Password Policies In this post we will see the steps for Creating Fine Grained Password Policies (FGPP). In Microsoft Windows 2000 and Windows Server 2003 Active Directory domains, you could apply only one password and account lockout policy, which is specified in the domain’s Default Domain Policy, to all users in the domain. As a result, if you wanted different password and account lockout settings for different sets of users, you had to either create a password filter or deploy multiple domains. Both options were costly for different reasons. Starting from Windows Server 2008, you can use fine-grained password policies to specify multiple password policies and apply different password restrictions and account lockout policies to different sets of users within a single domain.

Creating Fine Grained Password Policies

In this post we will see the steps for creating fine grained password policies on Windows Server 2012 R2 domain controller. Once we create FGPP we would be applying it to a group named Laptop Users. This is a test group that consists of few users. I found it very easy to configure a FGPP on domain controller running on Windows Server 2012 R2 than Windows server 2008 R2.

To create FGPP, login to the domain controller using a domain admin account and click on Server Manager. To enable Fine-Grained Password Policies (FGPP), you need to open the Active Directory Administrative Center (ADAC), switch to the tree view and navigate to the System, Password Settings Container. Right-click the Password Settings Container object and select New and click on Password Settings. 

Creating Fine Grained Password Policies

Provide a name to the password policy. Set the Precedence attribute value to 2. For the remaining settings fill all of them with appropriate data.

[vc_row][vc_column][TS_VCSC_Info_Notice panel_type=”warning” panel_icon=”ts-awesome-hand-o-right” panel_title=”Note” font_title_family=”Default:regular” font_content_family=”Default:regular” el_file1=””]As per Microsoft, a lower value for the precedence attribute indicates that the PSO has a higher rank, or a higher priority, than other PSOs. For example, suppose an object has two PSOs linked to it. One PSO has a precedence value of 2 and the other PSO has a precedence value of 4. In this case, the PSO that has the precedence value of 2 has a higher rank and, hence, is applied to the object.[/TS_VCSC_Info_Notice][/vc_column][/vc_row]

Creating Fine Grained Password Policies

Now you need to apply this PSO to a group called Laptop Users. Click on Add and browse the group and click OK.

Creating Fine Grained Password Policies

To view the resultant PSO for a user open Active Directory Users and Computers. On the View menu, ensure that Advanced Features is checked. In the console tree, click Users. In the details pane, right-click the user account for which you want to view the resultant PSO, and then click Properties. Click the Attribute Editor tab, and then click Filter. Ensure that the Show attributes/Optional check box is selected. Ensure that the Show read-only attributes/Constructed check box is selected. Locate the value of the msDS-ResultantPSO attribute in the Attributes list.

Creating Fine Grained Password Policies

You can also view the resultant PSO for a user from the command line using dsget command. Open a command prompt & type the following command, and then press ENTER.

dsget user <User-DN> -effectivepso

 

Creating Fine Grained Password Policies

In the below screenshot we see that the FGPP is applied. The user tries changing the password to a simple password but he gets the error because we did specify in the policy that the password must meet complexity requirements.

Creating Fine Grained Password Policies

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Prajwal Desai
Posted by Prajwal Desai
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Prajwal Desai is a Microsoft MVP in Intune and SCCM. He writes articles on SCCM, Intune, Windows 365, Windows Server, Windows 11, WordPress and other topics, with the goal of providing people with useful information.
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