a cautionary tale

[David Kreuter]

Hi: Yesterday one of the tech support crew at a large client mistakenly 
did a CP DELETE of some I/O devices (DASD) using dynamic I/O. Mistakenly 
'cause the rdev and subchannels were only offline on LPAR "A".  On LPAR 
"B" and "C" the devices were in use with something called Oracle that 
runs something known as databases.  20 linuxen running Oracle crashed 
hard - what could they do? Their disks became boxed.

The recovery much to my delight wans't onerous! Linux flooded the 3270 
with lotsa messages; then we stopped ORACLE; umounted the volumes; 
reLINKed; ran some filesystem check utilities; turned it over to the DBA 
who did a few small things; and everything recovered.No  data loss.

Cynic that I am I still think dumb luck played a part here; the linux 
admin thinks otherwise.  In any case linux on the mainframe under  z/VM 
continues to astound and delight.

David Kreuter