There will be parts of this post that may be challenging to read, but stretch yourself and give it a try.
I had been wrestling with an issue at work for several weeks, one that I thought I had created with my inexperience in my new responsibilities. Being a still-new system administrator, I made sure that I got good instruction on the basics of how to create a certain type of object, but I had to dig into the bowels of the internet to get the rest of the information I needed to make it work for the customer I was serving. As an administrator I have a great deal of access to created objects, but sometimes I need to see how something works from a general user’s set of permissions. As a result, I got stuck with something I couldn’t get rid of. It wasn’t causing any problems, but it was there and it shouldn’t have been.
I looked and looked and searched and hunted and couldn’t find anything I hadn’t already tried on my own. I reached out to the person who had given me the initial instruction, who, in turn, reached out to someone else. The contact’s contact said that this sometimes happens when that type of object is created in the way I created it. Everything he suggested, I had already tried. Swing and a miss.
Fortunately a shift of a few words and tossing in some stuff that seemed irrelevant before and I had a new list of DuckDuckGo hits! As one does with search engine responses, I started clicking through them to see what might work. Discarding the first couple as not being remotely associated with my problem, I found, on the third page I opened, exactly the situation I was seeing, and, even better, a resolution. The downside was that it wasn’t going to be done within the graphical environment of Microsoft Exchange; I was going to have to go into —DUN DUN DUNNNNNNNNNNN—The Shell.
For the uninitiated, the Shell is a command-line interface, the black box with the blinking cursor, and you type into it what you want to make happen. The Exchange Shell is a command line interface to Microsoft Exchange, and today I found out why it exists. It exists because there are things that don’t happen or show up in the graphical environment. I needed to change permissions, specifically MY permissions, on that object I created. The graphical environment indicated that the permissions were as they should be. However, when I requested in the shell, a list of the permissions associated with that object, I saw that, regardless of what the graphical environment showed, my permissions had not been removed as I had intended. Also within the shell I was able to successfully remove the permissions completely. Within ten minutes, all traces of that object were gone, never to reappear.
Geeks as a population segment love the command line. Novice and intermediate techs and regular society—not so much. I find it very useful for utilities that aren’t available in a graphical environment, but I don’t have the familiarity with it that I should. Working in the Mac operating system, I actually use it more than I do in a Windows system, but I anticipate using it quite a bit when I get more fully into Linux. Using a command line interface requires a much better knowledge of what is available to do, because the options aren’t laid out before you to select from. But if I needed one more incentive to learn to love the command line, today’s experience provided it.
Does this remind you of something that you feared at one time, but which turned out to be quite valuable? Fear, in and of itself, serves a purpose. It can prevent us from our own natural stupidity, and there’s no telling how often in my life a healthy fear of something has kept me from causing my own death. But there’s also no telling how often I have passed on opportunities because of fear. I have lived a life of apprehension, and most of my fear was that I would find that I wasn’t capable of learning something I needed to know. Silly enough, that has never borne out.
In the profession of information technology, the landscape shifts quickly. It is no place for someone with a disinclination for continuing education. Much of what I learned when I first got interested in computers no longer applies to most of the equipment in use today. There is a portion of it that is universal and timeless, but the application of that small fraction changes with each new discovery. Standing still is moving backward. That being so, what I found most useful today was, in fact, the earliest operation of modern computing technology: my new friend, the command line.
So tell me: when you stand up and look your fears in the face, what is it that you usually find?