Logon as a Service - Loses Password

[Neily]

We have a few servers that have to start some Windows services with domain accounts.

When we first set these up the services logged in and started fine.

Upon restart (and sometimes randomly during the day) the service doesn't start up again. If I logon to server and try to manually start service it complains with Logon Failure. If I reenter the password it works though.

I have assigned these services the 'log on as a service' right in group policy, but it doesn't work.

I have another domain where these settings work fine!!

Does anyone have any ideas?

All servers are 2k3 fully up-to-date.

Thanks

 

[itsp1965]

Do these servers use the same domain account for the services or do multiple services use the same domain account? Are there any password policies applied to these accounts?

 

[Neily]

each server has a different service which has its own domain user account.

When you say password policies... I believe the policy which says when a password expires is applied, but these user accounts have "password never expires" ticked in AD.

 

[TNGPicard]

I have this problem pretty regularly now although I never used to. It started mid-October when I installed a bunch of Windows Updates and now it plagues about 4 servers. I do however have ONE domain account setup to logon as a service on these machines and have one account I use for all these types of tasks. I guess I never thought of checking to see if one is maybe changing the password preventing the other one from using it. I always set it back to the same thing. I'm going to try making it where the account can't control its own password.

Really, I only have this problem if I have to restart the machine (which happens about once a month when I deploy updates or when I'm moving equipment around in my computer room --- which since I'm doing fairly frequently right now and I don't really want to move a server from one rack to another with it powered up....

TNG