I was a youngin and new to SNA networking and I needed to see the status of a PEP node … I remembered the VTAM sysprog telling me that he made a number of shortcut execs for Netview and I should use them. There were a bunch. I figured Display Net was DN and was surprised he decided that was for V NET,INACT,PEP09,I
The whole dang ATM network went down in a flash. I brought it back up and talked to the Ops Mgr so he knew what I had done, told me thanks and then had a review of ALL shortcut commands that did damage . Matt Hogstrom PGP key 0F143BC1 > On Mar 5, 2025, at 17:41, Seymour J Metz <[email protected]> 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 <[email protected]> on behalf of > Phil Smith III <[email protected]> > Sent: Wednesday, March 5, 2025 6:01 PM > To: [email protected] > 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 [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 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
