UMRA – Active Directory AS400 Password Sync

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If you want to learn the basics on how to connect to UMRA with its COM object, please see my original post on “Basics of UMRA COM”.

UMRA – Active Directory AS400 Password Sync

In recent months I’ve seen more and more of our clients wanting to do password resets in Active Directory, but also at the same time change the passwords in the AS400 system they have. Typically this process would be difficult from a Web Portal perspective. In many cases some clients might have some type of VBScript, PowerShell Script, or Pearl script to sync both, but these methods take a long time to learn, and error handle is near to none at the most. However, when using UMRA to sync your passwords from Active Directory to an AS400 this process couldn’t be easier. If you do this with PowsShell, you can now import your PowerShell script into UMRA and have a simple drag and drop item that you can use anywhere in your UMRA scripts. In most deployments we’ve used a combination of UMRA’s ability to call the command line, to sync AD with an AS400. Now some of you might be asking, how we connect the 2, simple, most AS400 systems have an API that contains a few methods where you can pass a username, and a new password, or new userdata to your AS400. Methods such as updateuser, updatepassword and so on. So, not only can you keep your AD and AS400 users passwords in sync, you can also keep their AD attributes in sync with AS400, but that will be another blog. Now, be aware, that not all AS400 work like this, so consult your AS400’s documentation before you try to create such a UMRA scripts.

How, has this helped our clients? It’s helped speed up the process of user password resets. You don’t need to grant users any elevated rights in Active Directory or other systems, you can now create a simple webpage in ASP PHP .NET etc. and user UMRA COM Object Methods to call your UMRA scripts through AJAX JSON etc. I hope this blog helps some of you out there if you were wondering if UMRA had this ability.