AD Recycle Bin Tool

Last year Windows IT Pro magazine highlighted ADRecycleBin from Overall Solutions. It's an excellent free utility to bring back deleted items (or reanimate for earlier Active Directory installations than 2008 R2).

It's a very nice alternative to the built-in feature in Windows Server 2008 R2 and is a drastic improvement over item recovery in earlier versions of Active Directory with a great GUI interface.

They have a couple of other interesting products in Maven, ResetPass and Action Engine, not everything is free, but it's close.

Update: Unfortunately the original site and tools are gone, but the author was kind enough to share it with me. Here's the app, at least until I'm told not to share it online.

Sysinternals

If you're in IT working with Windows and haven't heard of Sysinternals, you may want to check to see if you've been living under a rock.

Sysinternals started as the community or free arm of Winternals, the money making portion of the company. Microsoft purchased Winternals back in 2006 for its IP and brain-trust. Mark Russinovich has been the most active of the original staff, appearing at numerous conferences, blogging and evangelising the Microsoft operating systems.

The Sysinternals site has numerous, extremely useful troubleshooting and informational utilities; so much so I could devote this blog to their tools for the next year or three. Since access to the site is free, as are the downloads, help files and instructions, I'll just highlight a few things here...

Utilities:
Autoruns - Displays list of applications, drivers loaded and much more, that start at boot time. Includes locations of registry and file locations. Great for hunting malware.
Process Explorer - Displays all running processes and subprocesses, plus open handles, threads, paths, a veritable cornucopia of information. Task manager wishes it was this great.
Process Monitor - Allows you to monitor file system, registry, process, thread and DLL activity in real-time.
TCPView - Get detailed listings of all TCP and UDP endpoints on your system, including source and destination.

The Learning Resources are also impressive, with great videos and articles .

And as I mentioned, this is all free.

Jetable E-mail Addresses

I'm not sure if there's another industry out there that requires the sheer amount of access-based content that the IT industry does. What I mean by access-based content is information that requires a a login, signup or tithe (in the form of your e-mail address) for entrance to, or downloads of, eBooks, white-papers, files, blogs, forums, webcasts, trial applications, etc.

Many of the sites that require some sort of access, I will never visit again. So why give access to any of my mailboxes for a possible endless stream of unread mail? And why chance winding up on a spam list or having my address sold to "industry partners"?

This is where Jetable comes in. You can create a disposal e-mail address that will expire in one hour to one month, your choice. Jetable's service creates a time-limited e-mail forward to a real address. Just put in your real e-mail address, choose a Life Span based on how long you need (I usually choose one day) and click Create...

They support ten languages and have a Firefox plug-in (if you're into that sort of thing). Oh yeah, it's free!

Exchange Server Address List Service Failed

While creating a new user mailbox on an Exchange 2007 server a few moons ago, I received an error stating: "Exchange server address list service failed to respond", obviously stopping my creation task in its tracks.

This function is apparently one of the many that fall under the Microsoft Exchange System Attendant Service, once this service was restarted I was able to create my account and head out for a much deserved lunch.

MAPI32.DLL wrong version or corrupt

One of my clients recieved the error message "MAPI32.DLL wrong version or corrupt" a few months ago, after trying Outlook 2007 and reverting back to Outlook 2003. The fix was simpler than expected...

With Outlook closed, browse on over to C:\Program Files\Common Files\System\MSMAPI\1033 and rename the MSMAPI32.DLL file. Open Outlook again and the MSMAPI32.DLL file will be replaced with the proper version (Office or Outlook install media may be required).

User Profile Service service failed

While attempting to log onto an Windows Server 2008 R2 system with Exchange 2010 for the first time, I received the following error: "User Profile Service service failed the logon. User profile cannot be loaded."

After much searching, we found that during a reinstall some bits were left in C:\Users\Default\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Exchange Server

Once the files therein were removed, I was able to login successfully. We surmised that since the files were in the Default profile, something was stopping a new profile from being generated.