I will admit to one of my own: I was the only sysprog at a small shop, 4341, MVS/SP 1.3.6 (which I'd installed from CBIPO not all that long before), CICS, TOTAL DBMS, yadda yadda flambe.
We'd shut the entire system down for site power work early one Sunday morning. System wouldn't come back up: the three strings of CDC dual-density 3350 had 9 HDAs between them that needed replacing. They got replaced. Then I sat down with standalone ICKDSF and standalone DFDSS to get the thing back together. Needless to say, this was a long, boring job. About 15 volumes in or so, I fat-fingered an initialization command and got the address wrong. Took out one volume of a 5-volume TOTAL database...and that in turn required reloading of a couple of others... That turned into a 27-hour day, but the system was up and not too late Monday morning. On Thu, Mar 6, 2025 at 3:59 PM Jeremy Nicoll <jn.ls.mfrm...@letterboxes.org> wrote: > On Wed, 5 Mar 2025, at 23:01, Phil Smith III wrote: > > What stories can y'all share about times you or someone you worked with > > took down a system ... > > Well, I remember a senior colleague's lucky escape ... > > Quite early in my sysprog career, before PR/SM came along and gave us > our own test LPARs, a lot of our testing was done on the programmers' > test system on one specific 2h lunchtime slot per week. > > Despite that system being thought of a development one only, it wasn't > unheard of for some production batch work to run there, and in any case > it shared its JES2 spool with the production system. Back in those days > we didn't run a sysout archiving tool. > > My colleague was demonstrating how we could test JES2 function using a > secondary JES2 (ie one started as an ordinary STC, as far as I remember, > under the primary JES2). Commands to the secondary one just had to be > prefixed by a different subsystem commmand character from any used for > primary subsystems. > > At the end of our tests my colleague, while continuing to explain the > purpose of successive commands didn't pay enough attention to what they > were typing as they entered the command to purge everything from the > spool and was about to hit enter when I - very much the junior - said: > STOP! and asked: shouldn't that have the secondary JES's command > character? > > Swearing ensued, but not as much as would have done if the command had > been issued. > > > -- > Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own. > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, > send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN > -- Jay Maynard ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
