[SunRescue] Re: Best wishes for Bill...

[Ken Hansen]

My story:

Mainframe datacenter. late 1980's (1987?)a string of 3480 tape drives (the
latest and greatest from IBM, about the size of a squared-off 8 track tape)
Anyway...

End of the shift, two fellows talking at the corner of the string of tape
drives (8), the youger fellow is idly tapping around the case, waiting to go
home, when all of a sudden his left hand finds the "Big Red Switch" for the
string of tape drives. Poof.

How bad could that be, you say - eight back up jobs die, no big deal, right?

Well, to get the maximum performance from their drives, IBM decided to
tightly couple those drives to the CPU - not the I/O controller. Poof. One
of the companies 3090/600 mainframes died. (This was the biggest machine IBM
made at that time)

Lesson learned - no blame, the Mfg. should have put a cover over such an
important switch. Oh, and it is good to be the son of the CIO.

True story. And no, it was not me. (My famous flub occurred while running a
dozen backup jobs for DB/2 databases with (what later proved to be) bad
instructions...)

Ken

----- Original Message -----
From: "Kurt Huhn" <kurthuhn at k-huhn.com>
To: <rescue at sunhelp.org>
Sent: Sunday, November 05, 2000 2:40 PM
Subject: Re: [SunRescue] Re: Best wishes for Bill...


> > The poor girl who did it?  Since she didnt KNOW what the button was for
> > when she pushed it, she didnt get punished - altho I'm sure she felt
like
> > shit for a week or two.  I think the kidding from her coworkers was
> enough.
> >
>
> Amazing - every sysadmin must have a "big red button" story.  A co-worker
> hit the big red button at a pharmacuetical company in CA.  In his defense,
> he was reaching for the light switch on his way out and his arm hit the
> *uncovered* big red button.  This one set off the fire extinguishers too.
> He didn't get punished - because the button was *uncovered* - but the next
> day there was a plastic breakaway cover to protect it.  Never mind the
> constant ribbing from the rest of us.