I'm a new part-time sysadmin looking for advice, currently looking for ways to reset passwords remotely

As a way of contributing back to my old school (Chrisitan homeschooling), I took up a part time job there to help with their technical issues. It's nothing serious and majority of it has been setup, but it's still very rudimentary, little automation. I just finished school and they asked for my help so I accepted the offer. I've been looking for ways introduce more automation in preparation for me not being around after this year. Let's just say the staff at my school are not very technically adept.

Each student receives a laptop to access their learning materials online. The laptops contain 4 user accounts: 2 admin and 2 student-accessible accounts (one goes through a proxy for access control, another doesn't). The student accessible accounts are fitted in with a cert to access the school site which is managed by HQ. Now all this is set up using a ghetto script from HQ, it's all manual. Since Windows passwords are easy to bypass and password leak all the time (HQ uses the same password for all local administrative accounts nationwide), I decided to change my school's local administrative accounts for damage control.

Is there a built-in mechanism within Windows that allows me to remotely reset all local administrator passwords through the network? I'm still very much new to the practice of sysadmin-ing and some advice would be greatly appreciated.

www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin

Um, I don't think so. Using Active Directory you can reset any domain accounts, which is pretty easy to setup. But just in plain old windows, I don't think so.

You can change local account passwords via group policy but that also requires Active Directory.

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Yea, I hung out for awhile around /r/sysadmin IRC channel and basically got the same answer. Since I have no budget for a new server, I'll have to find another way.

There are a gazillion scripts on the interwebz to do this - use this website.