I'm having trouble with user accounts on my network.

Now, in the past I have always made sure that I do not keep a record of the user's passwords. I don't want to know their passwords, and having a comprehensive list of unencrypted passwords lying around is a security risk. So I create a randomized password which I give only to them, and do not keep a copy of it myself.

Suddenly I'm in a situation where it would be easier if I had all their passwords and could reset all their accounts at once, instead of trying to get them to change their passwords individually. Trying to get all my users to do something at the same time is like herding cats. I won't go into the technical details of why I need to recover their passwords, just take it on faith that I'd like to do a password recovery, and I'd like to do it in one fell swoop without having to ask each user to do something or to supply me with their password verbally.

Please note: Do not come back and say "why don't you just reset all the passwords if you're the administrator?" or other attempts at help that don't involve the recovery... Because the problem is much more detailed and technical than that, and I'm not giving you all the information. I'm just setting the stage for you: I want to do a recovery and I have good reasons for wanting to do this.

I'm trying to use this piece of software to do a brute-force on the password list. I've already extracted the hashes and I've got John.exe properly working to do brute force runs against the list of hashes. It's all working as intended.

The trick is that I want to speed up the brute force run. Because it just so happens that when I created the randomized passwords, I did so in a specific pattern that won't easily fall to a brute-force attack... unless you know the pattern and can program your brute-forcer to follow it.

The thing is, John.exe is programmable with all sorts of options. I just don't know how to program it for this particular pattern. It's hard to follow its documentation. I'm wondering if anyone else has used this program and if they know how to program it for a special pattern. Or if they can look at its dox and grok it better than I can. (By the way, I got no reply from the program's author when I asked the same question.)

I won't reveal the pattern publicly, but if anyone is willing to help me with this after they've seen the documentation for John.exe, PM me and we can talk directly about it.

Thanks in advance!