Tombstone
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Enterprise, Windows, Server, Microsoft on
The other day I made a stupid mistake.
This one was particularly stupid, as in a momentary fit of neatness, I deleted all the old Small Business Server Group Policy Objects from my main office server.
The AD looked a lot neater now.
However I’d just given myself a whole new world of hurt.
I’d upgraded our network earlier in the year, and had replaced the SBS 2003 box with a Windows Server 2008 machine. In the migration, all the old GPOs had made their way across to the server, and one or two of them weren’t suitable for the current network configuration. Deleting them shouldn’t mean too much disruption - or so I thought.
I was very very wrong indeed.
Deleting the GPOs also took out the associated Active Directory objects.
That wasn’t good at all.
Bang went all the users, all the mailboxes, and all my domain attached PCs were left unable to log in.
Ooops.
Luckily for me, Windows Server is designed to help deal with that sort of mistake. Active Directory Tombstone Recovery stores deleted AD objects - the trick, of course is to find a way to undelete them.
Again, luckily for me, the folk at Quest have a free tool to do just that. It’s not their full-featured Active Directory Recovery Manager, which is an excellent AD management tool. Object Restore for Active Directory is a simple tool that scans a server’s tombstoned objects, and gives you a list of what’s been deleted. Windows Server’s Tombstone Reanimation interfaces let you recover stored objects, and the Quest tool simplifies the recovery process, quickly dropping your recovered objects back in the Active Directory.
You can then move them into the appropriate place. My users could now log back into the server. However, that was only part of the story, as I had to recover the mailboxes and reconnect them to the user accounts. Again, the tools built into the server saved the day, as Exchange 2007’s wizards quickly put user and mail back in touch.
I was lucky. It took less than an hour to get everything back in place - thanks to the tools built into my server, and the free applications I found online.
The moral?
Don’t rush at things - and make sure you know exactly what a change means to your server, and to your users.
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