On Fri, Feb 5, 2010 at 10:46 AM, James A. Bohnsack <[email protected]> wrote:
>I've accidentally shutdown the main production system "once", as has every 
>systems programmer with whom I worked or who worked for me has done.  Only 
>once tho.

Indeed. A very, very long time ago, back at UofW, we had a machine called PRIV, 
that had a table of users and commands. You could "SMSG PRIV somecmd" and if 
you were enabled, it would do it. It was very granular, down to the specific 
operands: This let us do things like let a professor force his students, 
without giving him general FORCE privs (I was going to write "force his admin", 
but that had the wrong connotation!).

Anyway, I was doing some maintenance to PRIV. I logged on and was in a CP READ. 
Since I didn't want to take it down mid-command, I had the brilliant idea of 
doing an "SMSG * SHUTDOWN" (it was single-threaded, of course). And then I 
waited. And waited. 

All of a sudden one of the operators comes running out of the Red Room (the 
raised floor), yelling "SYSA just shut itself down!"

Of course, I immediately realized what I'd done. Hey, they were only students 
;-)

...phsiii

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