I've always felt that a series of painful DR drills was much better than not being prepared in a real disaster, and when my boss confiscated a tape or declared key personnel dead, I heartily approved. Every obstacle you create during drills is an obstacle you'll be better prepared for when the real thing hits.
You'll still get hit by the unexpected, but not as much. -- Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz http://mason.gmu.edu/~smetz3 עַם יִשְׂרָאֵל חַי נֵ֣צַח יִשְׂרָאֵ֔ל לֹ֥א יְשַׁקֵּ֖ר ________________________________________ From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List <IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU> on behalf of Radoslaw Skorupka <00000471ebeac275-dmarc-requ...@listserv.ua.edu> Sent: Friday, July 12, 2024 5:38 AM To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU Subject: Re: another z/OSMF rant. -- Catch-22 is killing me W dniu 11.07.2024 o 21:02, Jeremy Nicoll pisze: [...] > I recall that the first stages of our disaster recovery tests required someone > to put cartridges into 3480 drives in a machine room. We tested the whole > process (once we'd ironed out technical errors in the docs) using secretarial > staff, who knew nothing about the machines. We thought it possible that if > - say - there'd been a fire, /we/ might not be allowed into the room, but > perhaps someone like a fireman might be allowed in & needed instructions > that "anyone" could understand. It was my rule for DR drill. The youngest (in terms of employment) IT operator was responsible to read the procedure and perform IPL. To be exact, he was responsible for: - find the procedure in DR data center. Hardcopy. In some binder. In some cabinet. - start it reading - identify HMC and properc console. HMC was located in another room than consoles. Several consoles, but all of them had stickers with proper ID. - logon to HMC (yes, user and password was in the procedure) - perform POR - perform LOAD (IPL) - continue IPL process on MVS console, including start all of the subsystems, etc. Usually such guy was stressed, especially because there were some "VIP" guys behind him. However actually his role was to ...read the text. He wasn't examined. We examined the procedures. Every mistake or "I don't know what to do now" were important to me - just to fix and improve the procedure. And we repeated it. As many times as we needed. And we checked it after every major system change (z/OS upgrade, new DASD, new CPC, etc.) Finally our DR drill discussions started from the following: "OK, first we start mainframe system, it works, there is nothing to discuss. Let's look..." And it really worked that way. Our official DR test came down to 15-30 minutes of watching IPL (still performed by operator), eating pizza delivered by the management and teasing our non-mainframe colleagues and their problems. :-) -- Radoslaw Skorupka Lodz, Poland ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
