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Disable Windows Server 2012 R2 password expiry

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This post explains how to Disable Windows Server 2012 R2 password expiry. The reason that I discovered how to do this was that one of my server’s local Administrator password kept expiring every 45 days which was really annoying. If this was a production server then this is a good security feature but as the server is a demo server then it is really annoying.

As a side note I use really long passwords anyway (20+) characters so the password expiry is not really an issue as there is not technology available to crack the passwords at the moment!

After a bit of clicking through the server policies I found the setting that needed to be changed and was able to disable password expiry entirely on the server.

This is how I Disable Windows Server 2012 R2 users password expiry.

It is not a good idea on an enterprise system but as my server is a test server I wanted to stop the password from expiring every 45 days. Luckily this is a really easy process that takes a couple of minutes to do.

To disable password expiry do the following:

Click on the start bar and type “local security policy” and select Local Security Policy:

Disable Windows Server 2012 R2 users password expiry - Select Local Security Policy
Disable Windows Server 2012 R2 password expiry 1

This opens the Local Security Policy Group Policy Snapin:

Disable Windows Server 2012 R2 users password expiry - Local Security Policy
Disable Windows Server 2012 R2 password expiry 2

Open Account Policies and click on Password Policy:

Disable Windows Server 2012 R2 users password expiry - Select Password Policy
Disable Windows Server 2012 R2 password expiry 3

Double click on Maximum password age:

Disable Windows Server 2012 R2 users password expiry - Change Maximum password age.
Disable Windows Server 2012 R2 password expiry 4

Change the default 45 days to a value in days that the password will be changed. In my case I set it to 0 as I don’t want it to ever expire. Click apply to save the changes:

Disable Windows Server 2012 R2 users password expiry - set password age to 0
Disable Windows Server 2012 R2 password expiry 5

The password is now set to never expire. Click OK to close the wizard.:

Disable Windows Server 2012 R2 users password expiry - save
Disable Windows Server 2012 R2 password expiry 6

You will now see that the minimum password age is now set to 0:

Disable Windows Server 2012 R2 users password expiry - done.
Disable Windows Server 2012 R2 password expiry 7

Close the window and you have successfully disabled password expiry on your Windows 2012 R2 server.

As I stated earlier it is really not recommended to have the Local Administrator password set to never expire on a production server and this process should only be done on demo/ dev servers.

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