Made a big OOPS tonight, something that could/should have been avoided by a slightly better UI/usability design on the part of VMWare Server.
As I mentioned a couple days ago, I have started running my web server (the 0ne hosting this blog among other things) in a virtual machine, using VMWare Server. I happily got everything installed and up and running, but then noticed what appeared to be a bug in the version of Apache I was using that caused some hiccups with mod_proxy. I looked it up and it appeared that the next point release of Apache took care of the problem – but I’m running Debian stable and it wasn’t available.
I read up on running mixed stable/testing packages in Debian, and thought I was ready to go. My plan was to take a VMWare Snapshot before the upgrade and if something messed up I could quickly roll it back.
Well, something went wrong and apache wouldn’t start after upgrading it to Testing. Getting annoyed, I decided to rollback to the snapshot and deal with it another night. Here’s where the OOPS comes in….
I click Snapshot…Take Snapshot instead of Revert to Snapshot (they’re right next to each other on the menu). CRAP, my safe snapshot was now being overwritten without any prompting and I was effectively hosed. A nice little confirmation prompt would have been great to have, VMWare. Thanks.
This reminded me of the great UI design I ran into once when dealing with an HP server’s RAID controller. At one point you’re prompted to confirm a delete action. Every time we hit clicked to confirm the action (we did it 2-3 times), nothing would happen but the prompt disappearing. Upon further inspection, HP had swapped the OK and Cancel buttons so you wouldn’t easily and accidentally destroy your data.
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