Well, despite the morbid title, this is not about dead things. Well, not quite. And amazingly its not about Group Policy either.
In my ever increasing thirst for PowerShell knowledge, I thought I would experiment a bit with some Active Directory-based cmdlets this time. The result is two free PowerShell Cmdlets that retrieve and reanimate AD Tombstones (for an excellent backgrounder article on Tombstone Reanimation, check out Gil Kirkpatrick’s piece in TechNet Magazine from last September).
You can optionally register for and download these new AD tombstone cmdlets at www.sdmsoftware.com/freeware. Once you download and install the setup, and launch the console file that comes with it, you’ll have two new cmdlets at your disposal*:
get-SDMADTombstone
restore-SDMADTombstone
The first cmdlet, most obviously retrieves a listing of all deleted objects in a given domain. You can filter the results using the -Filter parameter to search for a given text string within the DN of the deleted object. The 2nd cmdlet, which does the actual restoral work, is meant to be used with the first one. So, for example, if I have a user "Dick Evans" who was deleted, and I want to restore him, I can issue the following command:
get-SDMADTombstone -Filter Evans | restore-SDMADTombstone
The restore- cmdlet also implements the -whatif parameter, so that you can see what objects will be restored prior to pulling the trigger.
So, I encourage everyone to download and check it out and provide feedback. I look forward to hearing your input.
Have fun!
Tags:
Active Directory, PowerShell, Tombstone Reanimation
* Note: This blog post was edited after the initial posting. Thanks to feedback from Dmitry, I renamed the cmdlets to be singular, in keeping with PowerShell convention, and also changed the output format of the date fields. Otherwise, everything is the same!
JUN
About the Author:
Darren Mar-Elia is CTO & Founder of SDM Software, Inc. Darren has over 25 years of IT and Software experience in the Microsoft technology area, including serving as a Director in Infrastructure at Charles Schwab, CTO of Windows Management Solutions at Quest Software, and Sr. Director of Product Engineering at DesktopStandard. He has been a Microsoft MVP in Group Policy technology for the last 6 years and has written and spoken on Active Directory, Group Policy and PowerShell topics frequently over the years. He maintains the popular Group Policy resource web site at www.gpoguy.com and has been a contributing editor for Windows IT Pro Magazine since 1997. He has written and contributed to twelve books on Windows. Darren also speaks frequently at conferences on Windows infrastructure topics.