ADRestore.NET rewrite
Last month I had couple of clients that needed to restore accidentally deleted user and computer account. Though there is a command line version of tombstone reanimation tool called adrestore, the clients were not CLI savvies and having a GUI version of this functionality could really help them out. Some time ago I wrote a GUI version just for the case in VB.NET, but as it turned out it was quite buggy (well, it was one of my first .NET GUI apps), so I set down and rewrote the application from scratch in C#.
Now, if you are not familiar with the concept of tombstone reanimation, I would suggest that at this point you go and read Gil Kirkpatrick's article at Techent - it explains what tombstones are and how does the tombstone reanimation process works.
So, if you are aware of tombstone reanimation limitations (only a small set of attributes is restored), still willing to restore a deleted object and prefer a GUI version, you will probably find this little tool useful.
Main features:
- Browsing the tombstones
- Domain Controller targeting
- Can be used with alternative credentials (convenient if you do not logon to your desktop as Domain Admin, which you should never do anyway)
- User/Computer/OU/Container reanimation
- Preview of tombstone attributes
Here are some sceenshots:
Enumerating tombstones
Previewing the tombstone attributes
Restoring a deleted user account
Notice that if you delete an OU with accounts in it, you will have to restore first the OUs the accounts were in, otherwise the reanimation of the child object will fail. It is not enough to create an OU with the same name as this will be a totally new object in AD and child object's lastKnowParent attribute will still reference the deleted OU. Here is a walthrough:
Initial state:
TestOU organizational unit is deleted:
State of tombstones (notice that lastKnownParent attribute of user and computer accounts reference the deleted OU):
OU is restored (lastKnowParent points to the restored OU's distinguished name):
Both computer and user accounts that resided in TestOU are reanimated:
