Hacker News Reader

Comment by csours | Hacker News Reader

ncpa.cpl forever baby

I work as a “contractor” and when I sit down to work with some sysadmin they watch me and ask out I bring up the old style config windows. One of them had started a sheet while watching me with all the run commands and helper phrases (North Carolina PennsylvAnia).

Run commands are great for me, but it sucks when I have to walk someone through something over the phone. It’s gotten to the point where I can’t walk people through the gui methods anymore and it’s actually easier to explain how to open a run prompt and type xyz

I have been doing this my entire career. IMO its always been much easier to tell someone to hold the Win key and press R and enter a short command than it is to guide them through the UI to whatever setting needs interacting with, especially over the phone.

All Linux users have known that forever... Also you can email a command to copy and paste into a terminal, try emailing a procedure like "open app X, click button Y, type Z in field W..."

Some of the people I work with don’t understand cmd/posh syntax. Additionally they are often working with air gapped systems, so copy paste is not really an option. Those 2 things make it really difficult to have someone do something by cli only, especially if it’s relatively complex command (pipes, regex, vars)

If you ever end up talking to Microsoft tier 2 support they'll do almost everything through PowerShell.

Which I think hints at the problem. Internally, Microsoft must not be dogfooding (or is it dogfeeding?) their GUI. It's an over-correction from the time when Windows was criticized for being too reliant on visual tools for administration and devs asked for better automation. Well, now scripting is the preferred way to interact with the OS and the GUI plays second fiddle.

There’s actually new functionality that has been specifically designed with no GUI on purpose. Do a google of split brain DNS. The only way to set it up is by creating additional DNS zones and creating DNS query filters. Can only be done in posh. There are other examples of that too, but I’ve had to implement split brain before so I know that one for a fact.

>North Carolina PennsylvAnia

What is that?

looks like ncpa (.cpl)

What does ncpa.cpl do? I assume it’s part of the Control Panel, but a cursory Google search doesn’t return any useful explanation.

It's the old school Network Connections manager.

Haha, yep. Sorry, I was relying on the context.

Whoever decided to move away from that had a lapse of reason that day, and every day he didn't back out of it later.

I'm a inetcpl.cpl man myself

Ah, a man of distinction and class

Reply on news.ycombinator.com