Unable to restore deleted AD object

When follow instructions in this link to recover a deleted object, I got error message "illegal modify operation". One of the workaround in the comment worked for me (the restore-adobject method): add a -NewName argument in the restore-adobject statement.


LDAP method didn't work well as it showed only first 1000 objects under "deleted objects" container while we had way more that number.

WMI Association Class

There is a special type of WMI class called "association class". This type of class binds two normal, related classes together. A typical example is association class for NIC-related classes. For each NIC in a system, there are two WMI classes for it: Win32_NetworkAdapter & Win32_NetworkAdapterConfiguration. The former mainly includes NIC hardware info, such as speed, MAC, media connection status, etc; the later mainly includes configuration info on a NIC, such as IP, DHCP, DNS, etc. More than often, you need to obtain info from both classes, and that's where association class comes to help.

Still using NIC as our example, windows defines an association class called Win32_NetworkAdapterSetting, through which you can access info from both above-mentioned classes. An association class include two members, one called element, the other called setting. Not surprisingly, element links to a Win32_NetworkAdapter object (because it is the element) and setting links to a Win32_NetworkAdapterConfiguration object (because it is the setting stuff). Below is how you use it:

$ac = Get-WmiObject -Class win32_NetworkAdapterSetting   #gets all NIC info
$connectedAdapters = $ac | where {([wmi]$_.element).netConnectionStatus -eq 2}
$connectedAdapters | foreach {([wmi]$_.setting)|select caption, dhcpEnabled,IPaddress,dnsServerSearchOrder }

[Powershell] Try-Catch fails to catch an exception?

I was running a script that does WMI query and found that my try-catch-final statement seemed not working. The exception was still shown on console instead of handled by my catch block.

It turns out that exceptions are categorized into two groups, terminating exceptions and non-terminating exceptions. By default, try-catch intercepts only terminating exceptions. No surprisingly, get-WMIobject exceptions are non-terminating exceptions.

There are two ways to make it work. One is to make all exception terminating by below assignment:

$ErrorActionPreference = "Stop"; #Make all errors terminating


Remember to reset the preference at the end of your script as this is global.


$ErrorActionPreference = "Continue"


Or right after get-WMIobject statement, check the value of $?


if ($?){ 
        #processing block
}
else {
       throw $error[0].exception
}