IT

Think of this real world scenario - a help desk guy accidentally 'nukes' a security group out of your AD environment. The security group in question had over 1000 items inside and had not been documented very well. Tapes from last night have already gone to off site storage and the idea of doing an authoritative restore just doesn't sound very appealing.

Not only can you stop and start Active Directory Domain Services in Windows 2008, there is also an AD Database Mounting Tool that can mount snapshots of Active Directory, assuming you have shadow copies available on your server.

If you want to read about the gory details (which isn't as bad as it might look) on restoring objects out of a shadow copy snapshot, read the excellent write up over here.

The best part, you don't have to take the DC offline to do all this. You can manipulate/export the data out of the snapshot side-by-side while the DC stays online.

Check out the site here to grab the new UPHClean 2.0 beta bits and learn more about the inner workings of the program.

Anyone that has ever dealt with terminal services and/or Citrix has probably used this wonderful program on their Windows 2000/2003 Server. Thankfully, a version of this was rolled into Vista and Windows 2008.

It is particularly handy with dealing with programs that have a 'stranglehold' on user profile hives and other locked files. Without the program, I've seen user profile errors on terminal servers and normal desktop machines. I would typically even install it on my XP Pro desktops when I ran XP.

UPHClean 2.0 also works with Vista and Server 2008 (when out of beta) and can be considered the 'next-gen' version of UPHClean. The current beta version is still 2003/XP only, but has a 64-bit version available.

Great program!

The best way to try out the new Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1, I think, is in a virtual machine. You can download a pre-made VHD that works under Virtual PC / Virtual Server / Hyper-V here. You can also find link to other versions of IE VHDs here.