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Office365PowershellSystem Administrator

Easily Enable Active Directory Recycle Bin in Windows Server 2012 R2

I recently enabled Azure Active Directory (AD) Connect and wanted to turn this feature on. After doing some reading, I found a simple way to enable the AD Recycle Bin.

  1. In the management console, go to Tools > Active Directory Administrative Center
  2. Select Local Domain and in the Tasks Pane
  3. Select Enable Recycle Bin.
  4. Click OK

    NOTE: Be aware this feature cannot be disabled.

  5. Click OK.  Once enabled, wait for AD replication to complete as this is a change made on the configuration partition. This process may take a while should your organization have a large active directory infrastructure.

A very simple enablement of a process that could save you hours of restore time.  Again, this process cannot be reversed once invoked.

PowershellSystem Administrator

Empty the Recycle Bin for All Users with Powershell

On a new client’s server, I ran into an issue where a drive was running low on space and I found that another user account on the server (which had been deleted) had files in the Recycle Bin!

Thankfully, I found this Powershell command which worked to delete the files. All you have to do is open a Powershell console as admin and run the following command:

Get-ChildItem “C:`$Recycle.bin\” -Force | Remove-Item -Recurse -force

You can append -Whatif to do a test run and see what files will be deleted before actually deleting them.

SecuritySystem AdministratorWindows 10

Reset Your Password in Windows 10 Bash / Ubuntu

If you forget your root password for Bash on Windows, you can do the following to reset your password:

First, run: lxrun /setdefaultuser root . This will open a new Bash window as root.

From there, run: passwd your_username and then enter your new root password

Then change the default user for Bash back to your user: lxrun /setdefaultuser your_username

 

That’s it! Enjoy Bash on Windows 10.

Server 2016System Administrator

Installing Windows Server 2016 (Part One)

So you’ve seen that Microsoft released an evaluation version of the Windows Server 2016 RTM and want to install it? Let’s get this started then! I’ll be doing this on my ESXI hypervisor. I’ve uploaded the ISO and created a VM. My machine had 1 CPU, 100GB of space, and 4GB of RAM.

Once you get the VM booted, you’ll see the purple screen you’ve come to recognize:

Click Next, and then you’ll have one option to install. You can’t say this is hard:

Next, you’ll have to choose the version that you want to install. You can install the eval with the desktop GUI or without it.

Choose the drive you want to install on and you’ll be off to the races.

It’s booting!!!!

And that’s it! You’ll boot into the screen below and you’ll be off on your Server 2016 adventure.