Great thread. I have memories of the hot air emanating from my shirt collar on a number of occasions:
1) installing ADR/Look and testing the command that routed CP commands to VM (before PR/SM, we ran the MVSen under VM. It froze all. When I was sure this was a coincidence, after everything was up, I ran it again. Turned out to be the culprit. Stopped the top-clearing of commercial banks twice in one day. 2) Linked an extent on SYS1.NUCLEUS and found out the hard way that NIP does not read more than one. We had two physical machines, and I told the operator to hold off in IPL'ing the other one for a moment. He was planning to go dancing later that evening, and was already wearing his coat (that also happened sometimes because the computer floor was really cold). So he said: "What?" and pressed START. Now we did not have a running OS. Enter the IPL tape from my drawer; this unfortunately was from another era and displayed the name of another bank on the VTAM screens for some uncomfortable moments; long enough for people to notice and be worried. 3) Compressed libraries in linklist concatenation. Somehow this was less interesting after LLA was introduced. 4) Not my doing but slapstick-level funny to think back about: January 1st, 1998, CA-1 decided to wipe all the tapes in STC tape robot, which had an EXPDT=98000. Those tapes were kept cautiously and for several reasons outside of tape management, and some person at UCC never would have thunk that his program would last that long. CA, having only changed the error messages from UCC-1 to CA-1 (and not even all of them) did not warn about this, at least not that we had seen. Great Y2K-predicting vibe. I think nothing beats the wiping of the sole source disk pack (not my doing). But in those years, all sources were mandatorily printed out on chain feed and hung in binders in gray steel cabinets. I heard it took them a week (with help of every secretary in the company) to type them all back in. the memories. best, René. > On 6 Mar 2025, at 14:51, roscoe5 > <[email protected]> wrote: > > I brought down almost our entire network with a vacuum cleaner. IBM had > DROP-shipped a remote 3174 for our DR exercise. It came off the truck on its > side, busted, but still worked later that day. As I was vacuuming styrofoam > out of the diskette drive, I tripped a circuit breaker. Now, this was in a > solid data center w redundant power grid and UPS DPUs. No power issues were > likely! But miscellaneous items, like workstations, monitors, and the single > Token Ring connection box going on to the 3720 and the mainframe had just a > single power cord. > > Needless to say, we built some redundancy into that “weakest link”. 😅 > > Sent from [Proton Mail](https://proton.me/mail/home) for iOS > > On Thu, Mar 6, 2025 at 8:24 AM, [email protected] > <[[email protected]](mailto:On Thu, Mar 6, 2025 > at 8:24 AM, [email protected] <<a href=)> wrote: > >> After more than 20 years working as a RACF administrator, a couple of years >> ago I achieved my own horror story:I deleted the active RACF databases >> (BOTH, PRIMARY and BACKUP), in a peak hour of the day...Details: >> We did recently migrate to a new z/OS version, and my intention was to >> delete the old RACF databases residing in the old volumes (their names were >> the same as the active ones). I listed them in 3.4, specifying VOLUME >> (because they were NOT cataloged), and then issued a DEL line command. As a >> result, I deleted the active ones!To be honest, I wasn't aware that a >> cataloged version on another volume may be deleted. A beginner mistake. >> Carefully looking again at what happened, I noticed that the DEL command >> issues the following caution alert (I didn't pay attention to it):<<< >> CAUTION: >> If TSO delete command was issued against an uncataloged data set, a >> cataloged version on a volume other than the one listed here may be >> deleted. >>>>>>> >> It was a tough day... >> Juan G. Mautalen >> >> ---------------------------------------------------------------------- >> 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
