I love scripting, and I am a huge advocate of PowerShell.  I talk about how it can be leveraged seemingly all the time to customers who don’t leverage it.  I encourage customers constantly to make use of it to make them more efficient.

But…  is it possible to take scripting too far?  Of course.

I stumbled across this article about a sysadmin who automated his job to arguably a ridiculous degree.

I shouldn’t say he arguably went too far.  He definitely did.  To me, the worst example in the article is where he automated the rollback of one of his user’s databases based on contents of an email if he received it from a particular end user.

Scripting is so beneficial virtually anyone in the IT field, or more specifically automation.  I applaud almost all efforts to do this.  However, scripting gets dicey when you begin to automate specifically decision making, especially complex decision making.

Don’t get me wrong, decision making is possible and beneficial in scripting, but it shouldn’t always be used.  I’ve many a times included conditional logic in a script, and it was absolutely essential to accomplishing the goal of the script.  However, sometimes decisions are just too complex to make based on limited information.

In this case, I have a lot of problems setting up what he did.  First off, how on earth can you tell just from some keywords in the contents of an email that you should roll back the database, without the end user asking specifically to roll back the database?  Even if the end user requested this, if the end user doesn’t know how to do this, there’s a pretty decent chance that this isn’t the best solution anyway.

Secondly, I seriously doubt the email was authenticated to be from this specific user.  IE, if this type of automation is wide spread given the general security posture of most email systems, it could be trivial to exploit to cause a day’s worth of data loss.

With all this said, I generally have the opposite problem with customers not automating anything, as opposed to customers automating things they shouldn’t, but this does demonstrate it’s possible to go to the opposite extreme.