Remember #cp talked to cp of course, but you could run a little cp virtually and use the cent sign? Nobody ever used the wrong one and shutdown big cp….
Sent from Yahoo Mail for iPad On Wednesday, March 5, 2025, 5:41 PM, Seymour J Metz <sme...@gmu.edu> wrote: Welll, this may seem penny ante and not nearly dramatic enough, but I once type EXEC CMS ERASE when I meant to type ERASE CMS EXEC. It was the fastest PA1 in the West and a very red face. No permanent damage, and nobody pointing at me laughing, but I was still embarrassed. -- 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 Phil Smith III <li...@akphs.com> Sent: Wednesday, March 5, 2025 6:01 PM To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU Subject: Stupid outages you caused (was: Cost of an outage) External Message: Use Caution 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 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 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
