Ctrl+c in newer versions of img

Question

Hello again,
I can't help noticing that more recent versions of img have lots of things
that are inimical to anybody trying to put together an unattended process:
- There are menus, and there are function keys.
- There is that annoying "Abort" button (which fortunately can be turned off
in the 7.0 engine)
- But most astonishingly, during an imaging operation, the user can press
ctrl+c. If they do, rather than simply aborting, a message is popped up to
confirm whether the user wants to cancel! (It is also worth mentioning that
if the user chooses Yes, the imaging engine then sits doing apparently
nothing for two minutes whereupon it finally bombs out. Why?)
This is most unfortunate as it follows the typical Microsoft tendency of
assuming that all processes are run only once, all processes are attended,
and all users should be able to do whatever they want.
Imagine you are trying to put together an unattended imaging process for a
university. (Some) students are, believe it or not, actively hostile: they
will deliberately disrupt a process if they can, and if they can do it so
that it hangs up and requires someone to visit in order to fix it, so much
the better. Students are not like staff at a company.
With older versions of the imaging engine, my scripting could simply trap
the return code to see whether a user had pressed ctrl+c to cancel out of
the imaging engine. I would then post a warning message and then
automatically launch imaging again. I can still do this, but because of
that confirmation message, someone is going to have to press a key before I
can trap the code. These computers are in computing centers distributed
across the campus. Some of them are a 45-minute drive from here.
Ordinarily, nobody visits the centers; their operation is automated. There
will be nobody there to see that the thing is asking for a confirmation.
All we will be able to see is that a computer was told to reimage itself and
didn't finish, and that now nobody's using it. We will probably issue
another imaging request to see whether that fixes the problem. But because
the computer isn't going to reboot by itself, it will never pick up the
imaging request. Eventually, somebody will have to be detailed to take a
trip and visit to see what the problem is. The computer will be out of
commission until then, useless to everybody.
Could somebody please ask the developers to stop thinking only of attended
processes? Ideally I would like to have back an imaging engine with no
buttons, no menus and no function keys, and certainly no confirmation
requests. I don't care if they're usually there; I just need a way to
disable them all via scripting. One single variable to disable the lot
would be perfect.
Thanks,
Lisa.

Answer 1

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