I don't know what pressing Delete will do, but it seems safe enough!
- Reference: 1726471928
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2024/09/16/who_me/
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This week's eager learner is someone we'll Regomize as "Pat" who is a senior programmer and help desk supervisor for an agricultural concern. In that role he and a bunch of other bods enjoy admin privileges for their various domains, but – presumably for good reasons – each of the admins also has a regular user account without admin privileges. They do most of their business in their regular user accounts wherein no harm can be done, only employing the admin accounts when needed to do admin stuff.
It seems a sensible arrangement, really. Spend all your time in an admin account and things can get broken, right?
[1]
Anyway, a few years ago Pat was in the process of upgrading the system from Exchange 2007 to Exchange 2016 – skipping over the 2010 and 2013 releases, which was not uncommon. Obviously, there were quite a few differences between the two, both in terms of user interface and functionality.
[2]
[3]
The consultant the biz had brought in to help with the implementation noted that the admin users’ accounts all had mailboxes attached to them and wondered if this was entirely necessary. Given the way they worked – admins using their admin accounts only for admin stuff and not for regular user stuff – Pat agreed that it probably wasn't. But rather than just leap in, he thoughtfully contacted all the other admins to see what they thought.
Once they had all agreed that mailboxes were unnecessary on the admin accounts, Pat jumped into the Exchange Administration Console, which was entirely different to its equivalent in the 2007 version. He spotted that there was a "Disable" option but decided that wasn't really what he wanted to do with these mailboxes.
[4]
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? FULL STEAM AHEAD!"
[5]Python script saw students booted off the mainframe for sending one insult too many
[6]Techie made a biblical boo-boo when trying to spread the word
[7]Bargain-hunting boss saw his bonus go up in a puff of self-inflicted smoke
[8]Developer tried to dress for success, but ended up attired for an expensive outage
He deleted what he believed to be the mailboxes and continued with his work.
It was about this time he started getting phone calls from the other admins. Why can’t I authenticate? Why is my login being rejected? Can you make sure my account hasn't been deactivated?
Realizing what had happened – all of the admin accounts except his own had been deleted – Pat immediately tried to reverse what he had done by retrieving the accounts from the Active Directory recycle bin.
Only to discover that he had not yet enabled the Active Directory recycle bin.
[9]
His own account had presumably been spared from delete-aggeddon only by the fact that he was logged into it at the time. Thankfully this allowed him sufficient privileges to rebuild the other administrators' accounts and privileges from scratch. Of course the other admins' accounts had all developed their little quirks and workarounds over the years, so Pat found that nothing really worked quite right again after that.
Until the org retired those servers and rebuilt the system from the ground up.
Pat learned never to delete anything without knowing a) exactly what was being deleted, and b) that it could be recovered if necessary.
Learning from experience can be hard, but it drives the lesson home. If you've got a learning experience you think other readers could benefit from – or at least have a laugh – [10]click here to send an email to Who, Me? and we might share it on some future Monday. ®
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Re: Ouch!!!
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.
Re: Ouch!!!
Her didnt actually mention MS , perhaps he was including Linux and its mail systems in his berating
Re: Ouch!!!
As far as I'm aware, nobody has ever upgraded "Exchange 2007 to Exchange 2016" on a linux box.
I mean, WINE is good, but sendmail/postfix/exim/dovecot/etc are better.
This is a common problem
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
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.
Re: This is a common problem
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.
"Didn't Know What They Were Doing"
... translates to, "Did not RTFM".
The "shouldn't have been mucking around with it if they didn't know what they were doing" is a fine attitude until the day the program's behavior doesn't match the documentation.
And how many times has that happened?
Re: "Didn't Know What They Were Doing"
> ... translates to, "Did not RTFM".
And how many times these days is a decent manual actually available that actually spells out what each command does? Today they struggle to just include all the options.
Re: the time saved [..] will be repaid ten thousandfold
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 [1]defensive programming is applied generally (I would say that proper explanatory popups should be included in that method).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defensive_programming
Re: This is a common problem
A system I used to use at work had a facility for aborting pending operations. If you used it, it popped up a box saying "Do you wish to remove this request? [Cancel] [Delete]" Go on, guess which one meant "yes".
Re: This is a common problem
The suspense is killing me - which one?
Cameras, Too
Back in the day, Mrs Mouse once tried to change the date format from US to UK on her digital camera by using the "Format" menu option.
UI designers just don't realise the thought processes that can go on in some users' heads
Re: Cameras, Too
Isnt that the entire point of their existence?
Other wise the back end coders could just throw a UI together will all functions in a column of alphabetically ordered buttons.
Re: Cameras, Too
Sadly, that's still better than the ribbon...
Re: Cameras, Too
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?"
I often say that the first requirement for a DBA is paranoia. This goes for other admin roles too. Postman Pat appears to have lacked that basic qualification.
Back in the day, little old me thought the DOS command called VOLUME was to adjust the hard drive volume (noise level).
It was only later that I found out that you could use it to assign a name to a specific partition (and that was after I got my hands on a MS-DOS manual)...
*crylaugh*
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.
b) that it could be recovered if necessary.
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.
Baling wire and ductape
In my experience, AD is held together with baling wire and ductape and one should never change or delete anything.
Ouch!!!
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.