Net user hidden switch

Holy moly... if only all of the internet problems were this easy to solve.

After creating and nuking 3 AWS boxes I finally broke down and regenerated the private cert. (I lost .pem file to interactively login a long time ago. Knife EC2 server create ftw!!)

Login and run my user_data script manually and get greeted with this 14 year old annoyance. Who in their right mind still runs win2k? Is it even supported?? Well, sadly we all know the answer to that question.

The password entered is longer than 14 characters.  Computers with Windows prior to Windows 2000 will not be able to use his account. Do you want to continue this operation? (Y/N) [Y]:

I nuked three boxes to find out my password was too long...

Combining last few drops of coffee with curiosity I ran the below command which to my complete and utter amazement succeeded. Half a google search later I find that this is a hidden switch in NET command... and now you know too

net user /add $user $password /yes

fyi: both /y and /yes work, and no matter how many times you type net help you wont get the answer you're looking for.

btw, here is the user data scrip:

<powershell>  #https://gist.github.com/vinyar/6735863;
  "[System Access]" | out-file c:\delete.cfg;  "PasswordComplexity = 0" | out-file c:\delete.cfg -append;  "[Version]"  | out-file c:\delete.cfg -append;  'signature="$CHICAGO$"'  | out-file c:\delete.cfg -append;    secedit /configure /db C:\Windows\security\new.sdb /cfg c:\delete.cfg /areas SECURITYPOLICY;    $user="UsernameGoesHere";  $password = "UserPasswordGoestHere";  net user /add $user $password;  net localgroup Administrators /add $user;    winrm quickconfig -q;  Enable-PSRemoting -force;  winrm set winrm/config/winrs '@{MaxMemoryPerShellMB="300"}';  winrm set winrm/config '@{MaxTimeoutms="1800000"}';  winrm set winrm/config/service '@{AllowUnencrypted="true"}';  winrm set winrm/config/service/auth '@{Basic="true"}';  winrm set winrm/config/service/auth '@{CredSSP="true"}';    netsh advfirewall firewall set rule name="Windows Remote Management (HTTP-In)" profile=public protocol=tcp localport=5985 new remoteip=any;</powershell>

Here is a random bit of awesomeness