As an operator a long time ago, I did not want to wait until 02:00 to perform time change. A little before 01:00, I set the clock back an hour. Though I did not think about an "hour ago" actually being "yesterday". I believe an immediate wait state was loaded, and I had to wake up the Sysprog to get things back up and running. He was not happy. I appreciate the decision and wisdom to do time change at 02:00 a little more now.
On Wed, Mar 5, 2025 at 5:01 PM Phil Smith III <[email protected]> wrote: > Rupert Reynolds wrote about taking down a system by compressing a PDS. > What stories can y'all share about times you or someone you worked with > took down a system in a way that made you SMH afterward? > > I'll start with a couple of VM stories: > > Back at University of Waterloo, we had four systems running VM/SP in an > SSI configuration (think "Sysplex", only less so) with 20,000 students > using the system (among other things). We had a service virtual machine (an > SVM; think "STC") named PRIV that would accept commands via SMSG (think > "TELL"), validate the issuer and command against a table, and issue the > command (or not) depending on whether they were authorized. This was nice, > and had granularity so, for example, BOB could recycle some SVMs but not > others, or could force off specific users. > > I was doing some enhancements to PRIV and logged onto it. Hmm, how to take > it down? I know: SMSG * SHUTDOWN > > Then I waited. And waited. And all of a sudden an operator came barreling > out of the Red Room yelling, "System A just shut itself down?!" > > Oops. Nothing I've written since has accepted SHUTDOWN as a command, so as > not to tempt anyone. > > > Years later, at my first vendor, I was testing a product for possible > acquisition. This was in the early days of VM/XA SP, which was notoriously > unreliable at that stage in its development (at one point the service for > it overflowed a tape, necessitating some quick work on IBM's part because > nobody had ever considered that a possibility). > > Because the possible acquisition was a Big Secret, I went down to our > (unstaffed) toy data center to work. I fired up the product and the system > crashed; not unusual for VM/XA SP, so I went over and started bringing it > back up. About halfway through, the other two developers came down to see > if they needed to do anything. I let them finish the process, and as soon > as I got a logo on my terminal, I logged back on and fired up the product > again. And it crashed again instantly. They both turned around and said, > "What did you do?" and I had to come clean! Turned out the product was > mucking with low core, ick. > > > Last one isn't my fault, from 15 years later. I was at Linuxcare, where we > were doing Linux provisioning under z/VM. One of our guys was onsite at a > bank doing a trial install and needed some disk space. He was really a > Linux guy, not a VM guy, but had mucked around on our MP3000, so he > [thought he] knew what to do: he found a free volume, attached it, and > formatted it. Oops: z/OS had had plans for that data, and folks were NOT > happy when they realized what he'd done. Of course it was at least partly > their fault for having left him alone on a production system on a > privileged ID. > > This was on a Friday and I was off that day because I was having knee > surgery. I got a call late that evening from our CEO saying, "You need to > be in Chicago first thing Monday morning". So early Monday I flew to ORD > and took a cab to an Embassy Suites and spent the day there working, > waiting for a call to go do...something. Finally I got one late in the day > saying "Nevermind, go home". I guess they found enough of a backup and > didn't want to have to discuss who screwed up worse. > > > What have YOU done that you wouldn't want on your resume? > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, > send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
