Are you sure you want to reformat ALL the computers?

[MongGrel]

I always disabled automatic updates on my computers. I set Windows to notify, but do nothing. I don't trust others to care for their machines, but since the office is running XP, I could turn the whole mess off. Nothing like the ease of use that comes from unsupported software. You know what you've got day after day :^D

yep.

 

[biostud]

Ick.

 

[Lean L]

Oh that reminds me I recently did something similar on my file server. I had a bunch of folders called A, B, C etc... for movies and I figured it's just easier to have them all in one folder. Since Linux permissions are a pain in the ass due to lack of inheritance all these folders have all sorts of random permissions depending on what user put them there (ex: my p2p user, myself, root etc) so it was easier to just go as root. I was typing the following command:

mv A/* .

Sounds fine right? Well I was going fast, doing B, C etc.. at one point I fumbled the keyboard and hit enter before typing the letter.

mv /* .

Yeah. That pretty much wrecked everything. It moved /bin /etc and lot of other stuff. I was able to move it back, but problem is, all the attributes and permissions did not match anymore so I had to compare with another Linux systems to get them to match again.

I still have not rebooted that server, and it scares me to try. It has redundant power supply and is on a ~4 hour battery backup system. I am not rebooting it, ever. :awe:

Psh...

Rule #1 of command line:

If you are manipulating a database, or using mv, find with the delete flag, chown/chmod/chgrp, or sed, always run first with a # in front of the command just to make sure you typed everything right.

Not using root account also helps in cases like this.

 

[Kaido]

Jaw kept dropping as I kept reading, holy cow! WOW!! Nightmare scenario!

I had something similar happen when I was testing Spiceworks. Did a standard install on a couple non-important machines. Ended up eating up 100% of the disk space & crashing them due to some glitch within a few days of the (standard) installation. Noppers, no thx.

 

[Lean L]

I was watching something the other day on my tablet and then the video started to skip and pause, then the PC became largely unresponsive.

Oooooohhh, Windows is downloading 4300 terabytes of updates again, and with multiple installation processes running it's maxed out my processor. And it always pops up the "Do you want to restart your computer now?" window and grabs focus, which has some convenient hotkeys active. I've caused some accidental reboots thanks to that because I was typing and happened to be hitting the key to trigger the Restart Now button.
At least they stopped the countdown-to-restart thing that Windows XP did, which was a giant middle finger from Microsoft.

The Windows approach to updates is "The update process is going to run because I say you're not doing anything important. Updating!!"


Also fun: Turn off the tablet because the battery's running low, only to find that it's going to attempt to install 13 updates. That then kicks the processor into high gear, increasing the power drain.

"Please do not turn of--"

I have an instance of WHS that would be forced to reboot even though I usually have an account logged in and expressly forbid windows from rebooting when a user is logged on.

So glad Balmer is gone.

 

[Chaotic42]

Format all Computers? (Y/N):
N
You have selected 'N'ow format all computers

Formatting... 1%

 

[DrPizza]

Format all Computers? (Y/N):
N
You have selected 'N'ow format all computers

Formatting... 1%

lol!

I think a bigger deal may be being made of this than necessary. Sort of. At the university I used to attend, machines were reimaged fairly regularly, and automatically. You were not allowed to save anything to the C: drive. Everything had to be stored on the server. At the school I'm at now, unless I'm mistaken, all of the computers have an identical image on them. In most cases, software that only a handful of users use is kept on the server, with exceptions for only a handful of things.

 

[Ichinisan]

lol!

I think a bigger deal may be being made of this than necessary. Sort of. At the university I used to attend, machines were reimaged fairly regularly, and automatically. You were not allowed to save anything to the C: drive. Everything had to be stored on the server. At the school I'm at now, unless I'm mistaken, all of the computers have an identical image on them. In most cases, software that only a handful of users use is kept on the server, with exceptions for only a handful of things.

The servers were also wiped.

 

[BarkingGhostar]

That's gotta be close to the worst case scenario.

Nah, had it hit their hospital, too, then that would have been the real nightmare.

 

[heymrdj]

And this is why my SCCM deployments have passwords...

 

[KeithP]

I was watching something the other day on my tablet and then the video started to skip and pause, then the PC became largely unresponsive.

Oooooohhh, Windows is downloading 4300 terabytes of updates again, and with multiple installation processes running it's maxed out my processor. And it always pops up the "Do you want to restart your computer now?" window and grabs focus, which has some convenient hotkeys active. I've caused some accidental reboots thanks to that because I was typing and happened to be hitting the key to trigger the Restart Now button.
At least they stopped the countdown-to-restart thing that Windows XP did, which was a giant middle finger from Microsoft.

The Windows approach to updates is "The update process is going to run because I say you're not doing anything important. Updating!!"


Also fun: Turn off the tablet because the battery's running low, only to find that it's going to attempt to install 13 updates. That then kicks the processor into high gear, increasing the power drain.

"Please do not turn of--"

Learn to configure Windows properly. Problem solved.

-KeithP

 

[Jeffg010]

Oh wow they are using SCCM too. Ever since my work place has implemented SCCM we now have tickets every week because SCCM would corrupt the WMI. This was very bad on XP. Now that we are migrating to win 7 it still happens too. How in the hell can this shit still happen when Microsoft developed both of these systems. You would think they have a way to fix this so it would never happen.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Psh...

Rule #1 of command line:

If you are manipulating a database, or using mv, find with the delete flag, chown/chmod/chgrp, or sed, always run first with a # in front of the command just to make sure you typed everything right.

Not using root account also helps in cases like this.

Would not have helped me in my case, since I was just going back and replacing each letter with the next one, and working fast, then hit enter by error. Normally for a single command I usually do something that will make it fail if I hit enter by accident but in this case I had 26 of them to do.

I had to run as root because of how stupid the permission system is in Linux and not all files had the same permissions due to being copied from different sources/users so root was the only user that had exclusive access.

What I do now for stuff like that is actually write a quick bash script, that way I can just run the script and delete it after.

 

[SketchMaster]

I need to print this out and put it up in the breakroom at work.

Everyone there is obsessed with "automation", everything needs a script, an application or whatever to do a task. I'm in no way opposed to getting rid of repetitive tasks, but we've already ran into issues where something went wild on them and it caused WEEKS of cleanup.

Some things need to have fail-safes to keep them from going out of control, or be kept as a manual process.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Yeah some automation is good, but too much of it can be bad. You either get a system that tries to take over the world, or a system that self KOs itself. :biggrin: