Musings of an IT Pro Evangelist : Active Directory

Active Directory Recycle Bin

txsnow — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 17:16:56 GMT

Yesterday I posted a link to my Active Directory Recycle Bin demo over on Edge. Today I thought I would follow that up that post with a few things about the recycle bin feature in R2.

The great thing about the AD Recycle Bin is that if you make the mistake of deleting say an entire OU (you know the one that contains the accounts of every high up executive), you will be able to restore those objects in their entirety to the same state they were in immediately before they were deleted. Previously we had to rely on re-animation of objects in AD that didn't restore all attributes and group memberships or purchase third party solutions in order to recover from accidental deletions.

A few things to be aware of:

In order to use the AD Recycle Bin all of the domain controllers in your forest need to be running Windows Server 2008 R2 and your forest needs to be in the R2 forest functional mode.
You need to enable the Recycle Bin feature since by default it's disabled. Once it's enabled, you cannot disable it so be aware before enabling the feature.
The default deleted item object lifetime is 180 days. You can increase or decrease that value using Powershell. You can also extend the ability to restore objects longer (via authoritative restore) by extending the tombstone lifetime.

For more information and details on how to execute a restore, take a look at the AD Recycle Bin step by step guide on TechNet.

RSAT for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2

txsnow — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 20:39:37 GMT

Wow what a crazy winter! I've been traveling around speaking to folks about Windows Server 2008 R2. Let me tell you all Prague is an amazing city, but winter there is COLD! *Shudder*. When I was in Prague speaking to all of the great MCT's who took the time out of their busy schedules to listen to this guy talk, I was asked about the Remote Server Administration Tools for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2. Well folks they are available now. If you want to get your hands on them simple head over to the download site and grab em while they are hot!

In the coming days I will also answer several questions that came up during my sessions regarding some of the new features on Windows Server 2008 R2. For those of you who are not MCT's and have not yet had a chance to learn about some of these features, head on over to TechNet Edge and check out my post on the beta release of Server 2008 R2 as well as my feature demo of the Active Directory Recycle bin. More feature demos are coming soon so keep checking!

Active Directory Migration and Windows Server 2008

txsnow — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 22:47:21 GMT

About two years ago I was the lead on an Active Directory migration/consolidation project where we collapsed several domains and restructured two others. It was a monster of a project and I don't know that we would have had the success that we had without the use of the Active Directory Migration Tool (ADMT) and the Migration Guide documentation. It looks like there is a new version of the tool (version 3.1) and Tim Springston has all of the details at his AD blog. If you have a current migration project or have a project on the horizon check out the post here and get a head start!