Using PowerShell to set up Automatic Login on Windows Servers

Some server based applications require to be logged into a service account to allow an Application or service to run, These applications usually require manual intervention by systems administrators to login to the account manually after a server restart.

There are many ways to setup Automatic Logon, using “control userpasswords2” via the Run Prompt, using Third Party utilities like LogonExpert or_ Sysinternals Autologon for Windows  _this simply using RegEdit and setting them manually.

I have created a PowerShell script for editing the registry to set this manually in a standardized way and could be run remotely. It is pretty simple and only requires version 1 of PowerShell.

#authors: [Luke] Murray (Luke.Geek.NZ) #Version: 0.1 #Purpose:

#The purpose of this PowerShell script is to set the AutoLogon and WinLogon registry strings using PowerShell, to setup a Windows Server #or Workstation for Automatic Logon. #The $UserName and $Password variables need to be configuration for your environment. Please make sure the $UserName variables follows #DOMAINNAME\SAMACCOUNTNAME format. #This needs to be ran using an Elevated PowerShell ISE or PowerShell window (with Admin access on the computer you are running this on).

$usrname = 'DOMAINNAME\SAMACCOUNTNAME' $password = 'PASSWORD' $RegistryLocation = 'HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon' Set-ItemProperty $RegistryLocation -Name 'AutoAdminLogon' -Value '1' Set-ItemProperty $RegistryLocation -Name 'DefaultUsername' -Value "$usrname" Set-ItemProperty $RegistryLocation -Name 'DefaultPassword' -Value "$password"

Note: Also note following this method, the username and password are not encrypted and stored as plain text in the registry.