active directory

[MrPstv]

How would i go about finding which workstations no longer exist and delete them from active directory.dont want to go round the whole site jotting down names if i can help it.

[rob_coles]

I just used Active Directory Last Logon Tool

[maniac]

I had a big clear out the other month. I just disabled the "unknown" computers for a couple of weeks and when the user complained they couldn't log on it was easy to identify the machine.

 

Any which were left were deleted.

 

Even if you make a mistake it's not a big problem to just take the machine out of the domain and recreate an account again.

 

That's precisesly what I do.

 

Even if you do delete something from AD you need, you can usually get it back because when you delete them they aren't actually deleted, they are merely tombstoned. There are several freeware tools out there to help recover deleted objects from AD, and they work as I've used them before when I accidently deleted about 30 active machine accounts on one ocassion

 

Mike.

[jamesb]

I find sysinternals ADrestore to be the simplest, easiest of the tools to do this.

 

Download, open command-line, run with the -r switch and choose which objects to restore.

[AliG]

OldCmp

 

I have used this, CAREFUL it must be used with care!

 

You can report first

then disable

then delete

[jmair]

First I clear out my DNS forward lookup, then after a week I have my list of computer names. YOU can then slect all or right click and export that list of computer names to excel. I'm not sure exactly how accurate that is, but that's what we do.