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Victoria University of Wellington Accidentally Nukes Files on All Desktop PCs

posted by Fnord666 on Sunday March 21 2021, @04:49AM   Printer-friendly
from the oops dept.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Victoria University of Wellington accidentally nukes files on all desktop PCs:

[On March 12th], IT staff at the Victoria University of Wellington started a maintenance procedure aimed at reclaiming space on the university network—in theory, by removing the profiles of students who no longer attend the university. The real impact, unfortunately, was much larger—affecting students, faculty, and staff across the university.

The New Zealand university's student newspaper reported the issue pretty thoroughly this Wednesday, although from a non-IT perspective. It sounds like an over-zealous Active Directory policy went out of bounds—the university's Digital Solutions department (what most places would refer to as Information Technology, or IT) declared that files stored on the university network drives, or on Microsoft's OneDrive cloud storage, were "fully protected."

A grad student reported that not "only files on the desktop were gone" but "my whole computer had been reset, too," which would be consistent with an AD operation removing her user profile from the machine entirely—in such a case, a user would be able to log in to the PC, but into a completely "clean" profile that looked factory new.

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 21 2021, @01:17PM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 21 2021, @01:17PM (#1127091)

    Not my story, but from very happy coworkers: schedule an upgrade to Windows 7 for all desktops at the end of the workday, accidentally target "All Computers (TM)" instead of only the desktops, end up with many server machines rebooting into an unattended desktop installation. Luckily, not all machines failed because halfway through the imaging server also killed itself.

    Took three days to restore everything, they first needed to build a new backup server to start recovery from backup...

  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 22 2021, @05:52AM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 22 2021, @05:52AM (#1127370)

    And this is why you run server operating systems on servers. WSUS doesn't allow you to push desktop Windows versions over server Windows versions like that.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 22 2021, @08:49PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 22 2021, @08:49PM (#1127676)

      so GNU+Linux or BSDs then?

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 22 2021, @09:14PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 22 2021, @09:14PM (#1127687)

        No, BusyBox/Linux all the way.