I don't know what pressing Delete will do, but it seems safe enough! Welcome once again to yet another Monday and another instalment of Who, Me? in which Register readers own up to the … let's say "learning experiences" … they've enjoyed up in their careers. This week's eager learner is someone we'll Regomize as "Pat" who is a senior programmer and help desk supervisor for an agricultural …
There should really have been a dialogue box popping up with the warning
DO YOU REALLY WANT TO SERIOUSLY TICK OFF ALL THE OTHER ADMINS?
Y/N??
REALLY??
Y/N?
OK, IT'S YOUR FUNERAL
More seriously, I am sort of surprised there wasn't any warning along the lines of "are you absolutely sure you want to remove these entire accounts from the system". Or maybe Pat ignored this, as you all too often get superfluous warning messages popping up that you just click away because you are tired of them (been there, done that). Sometimes that has dire consequences.
I think it's a little harsh to complain to MS about a lack of warnings, given how easily Linux/Unix would have let you delete those accounts. Probably wouldn't even have given you a warning...
That said, it really should have made it clear it was deleting the account rather than just the mailbox.
I think "guy in comments" was mostly bemoaning the poor, or lack of, confirmation on Windows in this situation, an OS that has so many confirmations for every action you want to do that, as has been said, you end up clicking through them without reading thanks to "confirmation overload" :-)
This happens at Santander bank with the maelstrom of anti fraud warnings when trying to transfer money .
Depending the reason you pick from the "What do you think you are doing transferring money??" menu you get somewhere between a torrent and a hurricane of badly thought out threats and horror stories which if you read them all you wouldn't know whether you were coming or going and would certainly never go ahead with whatever totally legitimate action you were attempting.
> This happens at Santander bank with the maelstrom of anti fraud warnings when trying to transfer money
Not unique to them, I have two other banks I use and they both throw up loads of warnings and dire threats of what could happen even when creating a payee for the first time
I don't know if MS always asking are you sure is better than the UNIX/LIinux assumption that you know what you are doing.
My colleague and I gave a list of user accounts on a Solaris system that hadn't been used in an arbitrary time - I think 90 days - to a deparment admin and she duly deleted all the old accounts. The trouble was that we had failed to a grep -v on low uid accounts and she removed the sys account. It took my colleague 5 days to get the system back up and running!
nope, been there, avoided doing that . At the time there was absolutely no indication on exchange that that delete button would delete the user account. Nowadays, if you have a hybrid setup and it's setup correctly you will get a message along the lines of you must do this in your local active directory.
There probably was one, but those boxes often lack important details. If you see a box that says "Are you sure?" with the title "Confirm deletion", then you'll probably click yes unless you really accidentally pressed the delete button. It doesn't say what it is deleting, just that it's deleting something. Even boxes that specifically name the thing will get some click through, but it doesn't help when lots of confirmation boxes are very low on detail.
I've done this, although not to that bad of an extent.
And yes, the "delete" command within the Exchange Admin Console a) deletes the mailbox by way of deleting the user account; the "disable" command merely removes the mailbox.
And no, there is ZERO confirmation for either of the commands.
Exchange Online allows you to remove a user's mailbox, but keeps their AzureAD account as long as you go in through the appropriate admin console. And if you are like [RedactedCo] and run a hybrid instance, if the account's tied to an on-prem user object, it won't let you delete the user unless you have full write-back turned on, IIRC. (I'd have to go an check on that to be certain...)
I cannot remember the exact Linux application this was as it's been 20 years, but the user interface did simething like
"ARE YOU ABSOLUTELY SURE YOU WANT TO DO THIS?"
"TYPE "YES!' TO CONTINUE"
So I typed "YES " (note the space)
An then it said something like.
"That was not a 'YES!". Aborting change" and i had to do it all over again and type "YES!"
A CLI will either perform the action, or at most say "are you sure Y/N?" A GUI will do similarly, either performing the action or giving you Yes/No dialog box to click your choice.
When a command does something big and irreversible, how difficult would be to have the command say for instance "the following actions will occur: delete account admin_fred; delete account admin_joe;" etc. or "format 4 TB volume that contains a valid NTFS filesystem last mounted on <date>" and give you a chance to proceed or not? It requires a small amount of extra programming, but the time saved by countless admins who do an oops will be repaid ten thousandfold.
This is what happens when engineers write software. And too often I see people say "well if you didn't know what you were doing you shouldn't have been mucking about with this stuff", thinking that software that protects one from their own mistakes is somehow a bad thing.
This has always been a problem.
In one of the operating systems for the 1960s/1970s-era Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-8 computers, the way you deleted an account was to go into the (text-mode) change-the-password program, open the account, and press [Escape] (or [Alt Mode], if that was how it was labelled on your terminal). Which fool thought that was a good idea?!
The true "Unix Way" couples command-line brevity with sensible defaults. Too many programmers omit that last item.
I've said this before, but it's worth repeating. That will just annoy people who do an "rm -r" and it gets turned into an "rm -i -r" that warns on every file in the directory. To get around that, they'll do an "rm -rf" which stops that. This has two bad consequences: they're not going to see the things normal rm would warn about because they put in a -f, and they're now starting to build -f into their instinctual use of rm.
Memory was very scarce, having a bunch of extra protection around commands that were often going to be executed with more than one person present was an extravagance you couldn't afford.
But in today's world when we have gigabytes of RAM in phones and a terabyte of storage is the size of your fingernail, there's no excuse for programmers to skimp on that sort of thing.
"But in today's world when we have gigabytes of RAM in phones and a terabyte of storage is the size of your fingernail, there's no excuse for programmers to skimp on that sort of thing."
Have you seen the size of a "basic" Windows 10/11 install? :-)
(Remember when Windows came on $single-digit floppy disks?)
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Not exactly. Technical writers are, as I understand it, commissioned well before the software is ready for the release date, to avod delays. So they're working with the Beta or earlier version.
(I actually think I have first heard of this on here, some years ago)
To be sure, except that repayment will not go into Redmond's ample coffers, so why bother ?
I don't know what it will take, but it took over three decades of Windows bugs and snafus to get the DOD to politely hint that enough was enough, so it'll be a while yet before the principle of defensive programming is applied generally (I would say that proper explanatory popups should be included in that method).
"Well, I couldn't find the "Cancel" key, but I do have a "Delete" key.
I used to have a "Cancel" key, but that was many years ago on a dumb terminal of one sort or another. I still have a "Break" key but I'm too scared to press that as I don't know what it might break.
I've wondered about this for many years, well back into my first forays into training and supporting school staff on using their shiny new School Computer.
The thought crystallises down to "Did they consider who would be using this?" Or under what circumstances.
I remember having to get some certification for Digital storage solutions. They'd been borged by Compaq at that point but it was still the old Digital equipment.
The pass mark in the exams was 96% i.e., you were allowed one wrong answer in a 25 question exam. The rationale was that if you made a mistake on the CLI with these systems, you could wipe the entire storage system, sometimes without even a y/n prompt!
That reminded my of some OEW training I did some while ago. The online course had "bite size" tests/quizzes scattered throughout and it wasn't unusual to have an 80% passmark and only 4 questions :-)
To this day I wonder if that was some sort of administrative error or just a twisted sense of humour on the part of the team creating the training course. Luckily, the final exam was all that mattered, although it mostly consisted of questions already asked in the quizzes.
I have to do some similar sorts of tests, annually, for the sorts of stuff that school staff have to do.
With the added bonus that most of the sub-tests say "select all that apply" and don't give a number. But some of the options aren't directly mapped to significant parts of the previous text, and some options are plausible/reasonably valid, if maybe not an essential answer i.e "Should you do.....?." in which at least one of the options would be useful if not mandatory. The dilemma being then, do they want it included because it would be useful to do, or excluded because it's not essential to do. The wording (should) being totally ambiguous in that context. The underlying problem is the scoring is by sub-section.. So that an error in one choice (whether omitting an option or adding one) means a zero in the whole subsection. The staff in the school ,of course, do it together ("Hey Joe, what you got for question 5 section 3b?") but we occasional staff aren't there to share the joy. So it becomes like those concealed speed cameras* that the locals all know about and can zoom along and then slow just before, but catch the visitors to town who are just slightly over the limit because it had changed a few moments before for no visible reason...
*Yes I got caught by one like that several years ago. It still annoys me and I've avoided shopping near there ever since.
Wow! You'd think in an education situation where it's teachers being tested the testers would have a clue about how set exam questions correctly :-)
That old joke/saying that goes "Those can, do. Those who can't, teach." needs an addendum. "Those who can't teach assess the teachers"
I love Clonezilla for asking 'Are you sure' and then 'Are you really sure?' before committing
But does it tell you what its going to do, or warn you "I think maybe you don't really want to do this" if you're about to do something that doesn't make sense like copying over a live volume?
Because if all it does is ask "are you sure" twice instead of once, then it is part of the problem, not part of the solution! Because asking the same question twice doesn't save anyone from themselves, other than people who have somehow accidentally clicked yes - and if the place you click 'yes' is the same place where you would start to click a command leaving you vulnerable to an accidental double click the fix is NOT to ask twice. It is to move the "are you sure" dialog to another location on the screen!!
The Ribbon gets a lot of hate.
Perhaps it's because I was only 15/16 at the time it came out, so rather youthful at the time, but I thought it was a much better design. A lot of hidden features were now more visible to the average user, like super/subscript text.
Now that I'm old, I might not enjoy UIs constantly changing, though.
The major issues basically boil down to:
1) It was a major change, and thus required most of the workforce to be retrained. There was no option to stagger the rollout and thus spread that workload.
2) It consumes a huge amount of vertical space. Vertical space on monitors is incredibly valuable, and several other changes in recent times had already destroyed a lot of it.
3) It cannot be customised. Most "power users" had customised their toolbar to get instant access to the things they used.
4) A lot of options either vanished entirely, or got buried so deeply that they may as well have been removed.
5) All the Save and Print functions make your document totally vanish. I got a lot of panicking users convinced that Word had just deleted the whole thing when they tried to save it.
Some of these have since got even worse - it's become really difficult to save documents in a place of your choosing instead of some random, never-again-to-be-seen location in OneDrive that you can't access on the train or at a customer site...
All of that. I had menu items specifically customised for my teams so that; 1) Stuff that we would never use in our line of work was completely hidden away, because it was a distraction for them to have to sort through it and wasted time and concentration that they never felt they had enough of and 2)I placed some items in the menus where I knew they would expect to find them, - not always the same as where Microsoft though they should go.
The actual saving in time was probably really small, but in terms of loss of focus and extra irritation looking for a menu item they needed when they were desperate to complete something that they needed to get right, and then move onto the next one, sometimes stuff that could impact on a kid's entire future, the time that they had been wasting previously seemed like an age to them.
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"Somebody who was 16 when the ribbon came out is now halfway through their life expectancy."
Which even maybe shorter if they keep bragging about how much they liked it & who promptly gets lynched by a rampaging mob of respectable silver haired IT Support staff, who finally realised the one thing they really couldn't stand was a young pup!
> more visible to the average user, like super/subscript text.
In Word 2003: Format, Font, Effects
I've done that maybe twice in 20 years but I had no trouble finding it.
If I did it more, I might like less than 4 clicks..... but a word processor interface is a mess in any case, and pulling-up "superscript" adds relatively few keystrokes unless I am highlighting tiny scraps of text. (And I should be using a Style....)
And all that Richard, Terry, and others say. A word processor is a tool, not a decoration.
I had to do it more often, which is how I know that in Word 2003, you could also highlight the text and press control++. You can subscript with control+-. Maybe those still work in modern Office. There were various techniques available for making the operation faster which didn't require moving everything.
No that is the job of UX (user experience) designers.
The UX designers decide the layout, text size, white spacing, contrast levels between text and background. And then the UI team design the aesthetics within those constraints and implement it.
I suspect with a camera the UX team will be mainly focused on the physical buttons and digitals controls during shooting, and the boring functions would have been de-prioritised until they ran out of time.
UI designers just don't realise the thought processes that can go on in some users' heads
To be fair format wasn't really in much use as a verb before computing needed it to describe the process of writing a logical layout onto physical (magnetic) media.
For the vast majority of native English speakers it is a noun refering to the layout itself.
For those fortunate in not being in receipt of Microsoft's benevolence creating a new file system on media is not usually referred to as formatting even in the case of a FAT file system. [eg newfs or mkfs]
Low level disk formatting (even possible now?) was also described as "Initialization" which better conveyed irreversibility and loss of any existing data.
Users or consumers may be clueless but the narrowness in the real world experience of UI designers and application developers leaves a great deal to be desired.
Whimsically I would replace "Format" with "Bugger" so when selecting "Bugger" alias "Format" the application dialog asks:
"(Re)Bugger your SD Card? [y/N]?"
Any user complaining after selecting "Y" in error, could then be effectively dealt with: "you asked it to bugger your SD card - the card is now clearly buggered - your problem is?"
A good point, but needs rephrasing away from the them and us of saying "users". We're all users. It's "Ordinary people". If a product is designed for use by ordinary people it needs to use ordinary concepts in ordinary ways. And that's ground up design. Mrs. Mouse should have been able to locate the correct control quickly and easily-y under a menu that leads to that sort of control.
With formatting storage in an other place, under a very different description- e.g. "clear storage" or some such thing.
My favourite stupidity is the iOS control that quickly locks and makes the phone safe if someone nicks it. Not under "Privacy and security" but rather "display and brightness" ffs!
"A good point, but needs rephrasing away from the them and us of saying "users". We're all users. It's "Ordinary people". If a product is designed for use by ordinary people it needs to use ordinary concepts in ordinary ways. And that's ground up design. Mrs. Mouse should have been able to locate the correct control quickly and easily-y under a menu that leads to that sort of control."
So, using that sensible logic, if I go to the Windows Settings app and type in "format", ideally it should then take me to, at least) the options for formatting a storage device, changing date format, selecting a keyboard layout, and possibly even the multi-screen layout dialog? Yeah, like that will ever happen :-) From an "average users" perspective though, that would actually be quite useful. Of course, for some users, they may not know they need to open the "Settings" app to make changes in the first place.
if I go to the Windows Settings app and type in "format", ideally it should then take me to, at least) the options for formatting a storage device, changing date format, selecting a keyboard layout, and possibly even the multi-screen layout dialog?
On Windows 11, it shows me "Region settings", "Set regional format", "Format a volume", etc
On the (pre-Master series) BBC Micro, with the official Acorn disc upgrade, formatting a floppy disc actually required you to type in a short BASIC program. (Although once you had typed it in correctly, you would soon have a freshly-formatted disc to save it onto .....)
In those days, it was less about "selling you pre-formatted discs" (which could have been single or double sided, 40 or 80 tracks, or for any number of different systems altogether .....) and more about leaving out whatever could be left out to get the firmware into a 2764 (and formatting discs wasn't something people did all that often anyway, so its omission wasn't even that big a deal).
Then he found the "Delete" option and surmised that that was the appropriate function to remove the mailboxes from the admin accounts. As Pat wrote to Who, Me?: "Delete what? Well, I'm in the Exchange Admin Console, so it's probably mailboxes, right?
I'm curios to know what was actually going on there in that not only can the email utility delete AD accounts it can group the admin ones together and delete them.
Was this in Exchange GUI , or some sort of command line thing?
It could be he'd googled some sort of powershell / vbscript and was not in fact doing anything connected to exchange at that point.
Irrespective of what had been agreed with others, I would have tried the disable option first and waited a few weeks until I was more familiar with the console before deleting the mailboxes. I'd probably have also used Powershell directly in any case as there is/was a specific command to specifically do that task.
>Was this in Exchange GUI , or some sort of command line thing?
The Exchange GUI - and PowerShell - both will allow you to delete mailboxes - and the associated AD account - provided you have Domain Admin or equivalent rights.
Although irrespective of what the Admins were saying, I'd be surprised if some of the admin mailboxes weren't being used for error logging or workflow messages from Exchange itself or other Microsoft systems.
The best way to recover would have been an authorative AD restore of those users then recreate their group memberships.
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But surely Pat had implemented backups on the old Exchange / AD server, and could have just restored from them, then done the migration again, because he kept notes of each migration step?
Not doing a backup, and risking a complete loss of all mails when the disk failed seems a much bigger screw up than pressing the delete key a few times.
We've all done it, or something like it. A typo or thinking you know something that you don't and you're in a hurry (a tight maintenance window or a bunch of expensive contractors with their meters running.. again, we've all been there) and that's when you discover that Murphy is ALWAYS watching.
A thing I always told the larval sysadmins I used to mentor was "Don't think you won't do it, that it will never happen to you... because it WILL. Blowing away an entire server with a typo as root is a rite of passage in this job."
And provided they'd done everything else right and there was nothing standing in the way of undoing their error as quickly as possible, they'd get away with it ONCE. The shaming and the resulting ruthless hazing from the other sysadmins was kept internal to the team.
I learned the hard way about deleting stuff. I developed a rule. Rename it today - delete it tomorrow.
Things which caught me, were unprintable (invisible) data in a file, and unusual attributes on a file. When you recreate the file is isn't exactly as it was, and it can barf.
This rule applies when restoring from a backup. The restore went ok - but it doesn't work. This was because there was an attribute missing on restored file.
When we compared the original (renamed) and restored - we found the difference.
You may also not have the authority to create a file with a given name.
So rename today - delete it tomorrow
I remember when you wrote files to a CDROM, the writer would change the *file's* attributes to ReadOnly. Because, I dunno, it's a read-only *DISK* so, hey, let's make all the *files* read-only as well. So copying them back later to where you needed them resulted in a completely borked installation as programs couldn't open the files they were trying to update.
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