What the deuce, Microsoft?

The most recent exclamation of that sort has arisen from the SNMP unattended configuration in Windows 2008. You see, configuring unattended SNMP settings in Windows 2003 was a fairly simple outpatient procedure, mostly documented in this somewhat old but for the most part still valid Microsoft KB. Personally, I found it too wordy for my tastes, and much rather read this file on an IBM website I found by chance while googling. Imagine that - nice documentation that is not from Microsoft on a Microsoft product¹. Oh, and being only able to put 3 hosts in the "Limit_Host" section does not apply to 2003. But I digress.

Getting back to the the topic at hand, I was building the SNMP unattended section for Windows 2008, when I encountered this: "You can configure only a single host with the A1 setting. Adding multiple hosts is not supported."

Adding multiple hosts is not supported.

Hwaht?! You took away a perfectly reasonable feature that was present in the unattend file of previous versions of Windows...why? Why must you do this to me Microsoft?²

P. S. Did I mention that I actually thought that doing unattended Windows 2008 would be simpler than unattended Windows 2003, because of the nicely documented and laid out Windows System Image Manager? I should have known better.


1. This is of course completely typical; most of the obscure Microsoft stuff can only be found in non-Microsoft places, with this exception.
2. Because it hates you and everything that you stand for. But we all knew that.