Okay, I'll give it a shot:
1) You have a critical APAR installation which requires management approval to apply it on production. The Ops Manager is in Aruba, the CIO is in a coma, and your other tech support staff are at a beer bust. What do you do? A) Ensure you've got full backups on Prod, then apply the APAR on your own authority. B) Test it on Dev first - your code monkeys aren't as important as keeping Production up and running. C) Test it on a Sandbox LPAR first - that's what it's there for. D) Sneak it into the Operator's night cycle, then go to the beer bust - let the tape apes take the blame! 2) The CIO, a big-iron neophyte, wants an explanation why you need an upgrade from a z890 to a z900, with an addition of 6 new CPUs and 256GB of main memory, as well as an appropriate number of shark spindles. What do you do? A) Explain the business need as outlined by overall production growth over the past four years. B) Provide RMF charts to show the past 2 years of increased use and the next two years of upgrade capacity. C) Go into a deep technical explanation of hardware and software requirements, explaining in hex wherever possible. D) Bore the CIO into the coma mentioned in Question 1, so that you won't catch seven kinds of hell when you apply that APAR on production until s/he regains consciousness. 3) The local bakery is having a special on donuts - 12 assorted for $6.95. You have four Tech Support staff as direct reports, but you also have 5 operators across two shifts who will require bribing, as well as the Ops Manager and the shift managers. You also have two external auditors doing a SOX review of the system. Two of the people are diabetic, one is lactose intolerant, and one is on Atkins. How many donuts do you order from the local bakery? A) 30 - Allows two per person, plus an extra two for you. B) 24 - Auditors (especially externals) don't get donuts, and YOU'RE the one on Atkins. C) 18 - And you keep them out of the site of the folks with the medical issues. D) None - The local bakery ain't Krispy Kreme! Answers on a 80-column card, please! -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Eric Sun Sent: Monday, June 25, 2007 04:30 To: IBM-MAIN@BAMA.UA.EDU Subject: Testing System Programmer Capabilities HI, all Our company recently had been given a task by our client to test the responsiveness and capabilities of their systems programmer in their test environment. Our tasks assigned include to hack their system to cause/simulate system and application outage, of course not to the extent of hanging/re-IPLing the whole system. Just want to know whether anyone out there have done any similar test before and willing to share what they have tested. Btw, we will be provided with powerful TSO user IDs but won't be allowed to touch any system module and probably just to change some control blocks in memory. Somehow, it seems easy to think what you can do in CICS and DB/2 but it's easier said than done in MVS. The systems programmers will be given at least 1-1/2 hour limit to resolve the problem. Thanks and regards Eric Sun [EMAIL PROTECTED] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html