I’d suggest limiting yourself to a single sarcastic TM a month, if that’s OK with you.

Um, and what exactly has happened to those “Fix it” buttons on MS placed all over in their KB articles?

Or do you mean, that Microsoft SUDDENLY realized that scripting/automation tasks are very valueable in sysadmin’s life? Maybe you should check your facts? Keywords: Windows Scrip Host (Visual Basic, JScript inbox, many other languages are pluggable), Automation/OLE Automation, or the last resort – UI Automation/MS Active Accessibility.

Here are technologies that have been there since forever (I didn’t mention modern tech like PowerShell for that reason – it hasn’t “been there since forever” – only 6 years) – yet, loons like to claim that Windows is not automatable.

this is not an attack on microsoft, but a reply to people who say that cli is better and that MS is only catching up to bash.
i know about the fix it and it great. although I think the cliisbetter idealogy is somewhat prevalent is MS too, since most devs have nerdish tendencies. I am not talking about automation/scripting. i am talking about administration.

I can’t think of a single task that I’ve ever had to resort to the CLI as the only means of fixing something.

I’m sure a few exist, but it isn’t the same fallback that it is in Linux. Since all the services being administrated have an API, you can have a CLI interface AND a GUI interface for essentially the same amount of work. The GUI isn’t sitting on top of the CLI.

Theoretically, you could have a voice interface that you could phone in commands to if you really wanted. Or Kinect gestures, etc.

Like I say, one sarcastic TM a month. Sometimes it’s hard to distinguish sarcasm from ignorance.

This “the ideology is somewhat prevalent in MS too?”

Let’s see. I work for Microsoft, and I presume you don’t.

No it is not. Neither “somewhat” or otherwise.

Hell, I don’t know of a fellow employee who even uses PowerShell — for most of us, Scripster is a far easier way to knock up an admin task or two, and although you might technically want to consider it “CLI,” the point of it is that you can copy the C# straight into a GUI program if it turns out to be useful.

the last straw was when I had to use the cli to disable hibernation. don’t even get me started on mdt and driver/update injection.

http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/145662-integrating-drivers-into-wds-bootwim/

The last straw? What last straw?

What do you do every day with your life, garegin? Turn hibernation on and off?

May you be blessed by the Great Wheel of Life and come back next time as a hedge-hog.

In other news, and because I am indeed a nerd under the garegin definition, it turns out that the C# mode for emacs works bloody well (so long as you have emacs v22 or v23). It’s a bit difficult to find (the FSF deprecates this sort of thing), but IRecommend™ version 0.85.

If I get some spare time during the week, I’m going to try the next emacs extension that apparently allows you to plug in to Visual Studio, simply as the default editor. If that works, there’s another extension that (and here I begin to have doubts) will actually embed Intellisense inside emacs.

Now, that I could make use of. The CLI? Not so much.

In the interest of fairness, I will admit to using cygwin pretty much every day. Essentially this is just find and grep. I haven’t really come to terms with the MS alternatives.

But then, I’m hardly a typical use case, even for Microsoft employees.

I don’t do it every day, but I don’t see why they couldn’t integrate it in the power manager gui. I had to also use the cli to lower the apple chime on my mac mini, because I do testing at night and it woke up everyone in the house.

How dare you claim anything that Apple made is less than flawless!

Lies! Lies and foul accusations!

(Also, I’d be careful if I were you, that Apple device has probably reported your misbehaviour to Apple secret police…)

this is ironic since apple invented the ambient light sensor to dim the led when it’s dark. im sure if the issue was brought up to apple designer’s they would have fixed it.

> I don’t do it every day, but I don’t see why they couldn’t integrate it in the power manager gui.

It’s the other way. It was present before http://techsalsa.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/enable-hibernation.jpg and removed in Vista

May I ask, why do you need that? It’s not YouDontNeedThat™, because there is a way to accomplish this – just not GUI. My guess would be small SSD on a system with a lot of mem, but who knows.

“MS is finally catching up and forcing users to use CLI workarounds for administrative tasts.”

No. CLI in Windows Server or Microsoft Server products existed for ages. And yes, typing commands is error prone. That is why PowerShell was born, because it features easy scriptability, uses intuitive, completion based commands ( like using a coherent -

i wonder if they can make the server os an add-on on top the regular one. because server 2003 is based on the xp codebase and 2008 on vista and so on.

The CLI isn’t expressly needed to administrate Windows Server. As always, you talk to everything via APIs. The CLI is just a human interface for those APIs, as are forms and buttons.

CLI administration on Windows server is, to some degree, just pacification. It’s been added to make *nix admins who are used to CLIs comfortable. Meanwhile, all services can be managed remotely in far richer GUIs because those GUIs call the same APIs.

The notion that the CLI is somehow the lowest level of access needs to be dispelled. It may be the unfortunate case on older unix environments, but not in modern environments like Windows. Scripting for the CLI is tantamount to scripting a script that drags the mouse around the screen and clicks for you. It might work, but it’s fragile and generally the wrong approach.

To give another example using the web, you COULD try and get tweets by scraping the html from someone’s twitter page and tediously parsing that html to find the messages.

If twitter changed their design even a tiny bit, it breaks the parser. However, this used to be the only way to get this sort of information if you wanted to aggregate weather, stocks, sports scores, etc.

These days we have APIs; In this example, they’re web services you can call to get structured data back in JSON or XML format. All of it typed (numbers are numbers, text is strings, etc.) and versioned so changes in the 1.1 version of the API don’t affect apps that rely on 1.0.

So these days, we simply call the twitter/weather/sports/stocks api, get the data and do whatever we want with it. it’s less fragile since we’re not operating on blind faith that something hasn’t changed since we last scraped a page.

Operating systems and applications work the same way. Rather than trying to automate interfaces built for HUMANS to talk to computers, you expose APIs specifically for applications to talk to each other. They’re properly typed and don’t need scraping and parsing to operate. This results in less fragile, faster communication.

you are preaching to the choir. I fully understand that cli is not api. what is stupid is when ms tells you to use the cli to do X. that means they are too lazy to make the gui for that function. if they made a CLI frontend that means, in theory, that they thought that one day a HUMAN will use that. if you don’t need it, they should just made the API and call it good.

It’s pretty rare that you need to use the CLI as a primary means of administration in Windows. You might be able to do the same thing in a GUI and the CLI, but rarely are things ONLY possible from the CLI.

CLI administration for Windows server is simply another means of administrating the server, not the primary means, and certainly not the only means.

“CLI administration for Windows server is simply another means of administrating the server, not the primary means, and certainly not the only means.”

Nah, mmc snap-ins are just figments of your own imagination, buddy.

“You might be able to do the same thing in a GUI and the CLI, but rarely are things ONLY possible from the CLI.”

There are a few instances though. What springs to mind is certutil (especially CDP/OCSP operational verification are not doable otherwise) and Team Foundation Server (yes, not directly Windows Server) which requires you to use CLI for tasks such as workspace management (force unlocking files, purging workspaces, etc.).

However, neither are common tasks to perform. Usually, you don’t need to purge workspaces manually or force unlock files unless you have a specific issue. And that’s about the point: You can use the GUI for all common – and even the majority of uncommon tasks – and then use the CLI for what you need whatever more customized things.

You can do the 95% common tasks in a friendly and efficient GUI, and the 5% uncommon tasks in a powerful CLI language which might be more suitable. Forcing you to use any kind of CLI, as powerful as it may be, is retarded. In Linux, because CLI = API, you wouldn’t want a GUI either: Most GUIs are half-assed wrappers for CLI programs often lacking specific options or simply usability. (there are exceptions though)

“Keywords: Windows Scrip Host (Visual Basic, JScript inbox, many other languages are pluggable), Automation/OLE Automation, or the last resort – UI Automation/MS Active Accessibility.”

You forgot to mention batch and AutoIt trollface

Hahaha, the Winbreds smack garegin around because he dares insult the glorious and perfect Windoze OS in any fashion.

Face it garegin, you will never be “one of them” unless you are constantly sucking Steve Ballmer’s cock.

Actually Adam, he was making fun of the CLI being used as a crutch for automation. But far be it from you to actually read the exchange.