Yes Guido what you noted would work well. It has been done before.
 
Someone who has good provisioning might not even care about this in fact. Most 
linked attributes tend to be provisioned by the nature of what they are used 
for (group memberships, manager, etc.) and therefore tend to be able to be 
recreated from your provisioning solution so long as your provisioning solution 
has a retention period upon object deletion. Extending your provisioning 
solution to do them all is probably worth your time if you do "most" already.
 
I would note, if you were already sync-ing out a lot of data, I would be 
inclined to only extend the schema to keep those attributes which are 
non-trivial to bring back (sidhistory, secret data, etc.) and just let the sync 
populate the rest back. That way you get your DIT space preserving in the 
average case, and repopulate in the rare.
Perhaps one could call my statement a "better than good" approach. :)
 
And of course, none of this is new. This is what I'm sure the ISVs that offer 
this service today do already (though I will admit I have never tried their 
products). You can re-implement it, but note that this is a RE-implementation, 
not an original implementation. :)
 
~Eric
 

________________________________

From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] on behalf of Grillenmeier, Guido
Sent: Sun 12/5/2004 6:55 AM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: RE: [ActiveDir] Restore AD



it's important to note, that adding sIDHistory to a reanimated object
via DsAddSidHistory won't work, if the original object to that SID is no
longer available (e.g. from domain, which has been shutdown in the
meantime). 

A good approach would be to add further attributes to keep in the
tombstone (this would also allow to keep the PW) - basically you could
add all the object's attribute in the tombstone for easier recovery
(will naturally have an impact on the available whitespace in the
database), but you can't do this for linked attributes (e.g. the
member/memberOf attribute).

This doesn't mean, that you can't extend the schema and do a nightly
"backup" of all linked objects (pref. via their GUIDs) for an object to
this attribute on the object itself (this again will have an impact on
db size). The challenge with cross-NC links remain, but could be solved
the same way. You could then leverage this information after tombstone
reanimation to get everything back => this will require additional
rights to the target objects which must be updated (e.g. groups where
the membership needs to be readded - especially in other NCs).

I've never implemented it this way, but have been thinking about it
quite a bit ;-)

/Guido

-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Eric Fleischman
Sent: Sunday, December 05, 2004 1:12 AM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: RE: [ActiveDir] Restore AD

To be clear, they don't "mimic" tombstone reanimation, they probably
leverage it.

Tombstone reanimation should probably be thought of as a powerful API
applications can leverage, not a solution itself. Through tombstone
reanimation one can bring an object back to life with properties that
could not otherwise be restored (SID, GUID) such that you can repopulate
other attributes as you see fit.

This is not to say repopulation is trivial.....think about linked values
in other NCs in the forest.....but it is doable.
The approach some apps might take (I'm speculating, I have not written
one) is to sync out of the forest data the user wishes to be able to
restore, then upon deletion they can use tombstone reanimation then
recreate the lost data.

ldifde can do *most* of what you want, so long as you wrap it up right.
Some of the caveats that come to mind:
1) One may need to touch many naming contexts so as to properly restore
the object to the original state
2) Secret data need be considered, if it is lost
3) sIDHistory need be added through a method other than ldif
(DsAddSidHistory)

But think through what needs to be done....if you delete user1 then
restore that user, you don't want to just restore that user....you also
want to "touch" the forward links which point to that user and recreate
them too. That implies your ldif export can't be used as is but rather
you need to parse out the appropriate forward links and recreate them,
not the objects which they are attached to.

My $0.02, just some offhanded thoughts.
~Eric



________________________________

From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] on behalf of Bryan Zink
Sent: Fri 12/3/2004 2:44 PM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: [ActiveDir] Restore AD



I've seen third party "recovery" consoles that mimic tombstone
reanimation.
They do this by maintaining a recent copy of all the attributes of all
user/group objects. As far as specific products, why not try something
simple like making an LDIFDE or CSVDE dump of your user and group
objects part of a nightly system state backup?  The biggest issue with
recovering SIDs is making sure your tombstone lifetime is sufficiently
long enough to cover a deletion that occurred "a long time ago".

----- Original Message -----
From: "Shawn Hayes" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Friday, December 03, 2004 2:01 PM
Subject: [ActiveDir] Restore AD


Why is it that MS hasn't added a deleted Security Principal retention
for AD much like Exchange Server's deleted mailbox retention?  Wouldn't
that
greatly simply recovering from small mishaps?   I am not talking about
the
tombstone feature with Windows 2003 AD where you still have to manually
recover Group Membership when recovering an account, but something
actually intelligent and useful that would restore Group Membership when
restoring accounts.  Shit, recover a Group from Deleted Security
Principal retention and have it add the back links to the memberof
attribute of the users that were members of the Group before the Group
was deleted.  Recover an OU and it restores Security Principals and
Members and Memberof attributes of all Security Principals within the
OU.  Anybody heard of something like this coming down the pike?

Shawn Hayes
MCSE (2003, 2000, NT) Messaging
Systems Engineer
City of Virginia Beach
(757) 219-2057
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