On Mar 6, 2025, at 8:00 AM, Jay Maynard 
<[email protected]> wrote:

Not my booboo, but one that was too easy to commit at my current employer:

We use ODDS for console automation and making our lives simpler. ODDS lets
you define commands that you simply enter at the console to trigger
scripts. We have one named SYSDRAIN that does what you'd expect: it shuts
down everything cleanly in preparation for an IPL.

SYSDRAIN now, as its first action, pops a WTO with the SMFID of the system
and asks you to enter it for verification. Before that was added, it was
far too easy to shut down the wrong LPAR…

That was my boo-boo. Back when I was writing SYSDRAIN, we had a PC with a 
terminal emulator with different windows attached to consoles for the different 
LPARs. I was testing SYSDRAIN on a test LPAR, going back in forth between my 
office to write code and then going to the office next door with the console PC 
to run the script. Then once, while I was in my office changing the code, 
someone else brought the production console into the foreground, and I didn’t 
notice.

Adding that prompt WTO was the next change I made.



--
Curtis Pew, Mainframe Specialist
The University of Texas at Austin | ET Campus Solutions







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