Re: Data Corruption / 400 -- MIDRANGE-L

System 34 in the early 80's, then System 38 and then many AS/400s. Never had
to restore anything from tape other than planned migrations and human error.
Even with those good old 3370 drives on the S/38 before checksumming, the CE
would replace the drive and pump the data and off we would go (well after
all the access paths were recovered).

----- Original Message -----
From: "alan shore" <SHOREA@dime.com>
To: <midrange-l@midrange.com>
Sent: Tuesday, April 09, 2002 9:32 AM
Subject: Re: Data Corruption / 400


> On an AS/400 since 1995. @ unscheduled down times. One for a bad disk, the
other for a bad board. Both times, systme repaired and back online within 3
hours. No data lost ever.Period.
>
> >>> <MacWheel99@aol.com> 04/08/02 04:29PM >>>
> Has anyone EVER suffered data corruption on their 400 business data bases
or
> ever heard of it happening for some reason other than failure of hard
drives,
> damaged objects, human error, software bugs, PC user in middle of doing
some
> update & the connection gets lost & the software was not written good
enough
> to recover from that scenario, malicious activity like hacker or someone
who
> lost their job & took improper action?
>
> Feel free to reply to me off list about this.
>
> I have a collegue who is in a heated discussion on in some list in the PC
> Windows Macintosh world.  They apparently take it for granted that reality
is
> that there are operating system crashes all the time that scramble
business
> data.  My friend says that in his many decades experience in the IBM
world,
> this has NEVER happened there.
>
> These Microsoft enthusiasts are flatly disbelieving him ... it must be a
> fluke for him.  So he looking for a quick poll ... how many years
experience
> someone in IBM 400 & its predecessor platforms & how many times has this
> happened to you?  So that he can then say to these guys ... well X people
in
> the 400 community who said they have Y aggregate years have only heard of
> this happening however many times.  So if it is a fluke, here is how many
> other people are having that fluke.
>
> In my personal over 40 years in this world, it has only happened once.
>
> We got our % disk space utilization significantly above 100 % by accident,
> during our Y2K conversion in 1998, primarily because our estimates for
disk
> space needed for multiple Pilots & conversion efforts were too low,
related
> to OS/400 math being off on what the M36 was taking, a lot of stuff was
> weird.  We didn't care to spend any time figuring it out.  Our goal was to
> fix it & fast, which we did.  The problem was discovered one day.  We got
it
> below 100% in less than 24 hours, identified corrupted data & recovered it
> from our backups.
>
> I also remember a hard disk failure from old age ... it was a 13 years old
> IBM hard drive & IBM's mean time to failure was 10 years.  IBM helped us
map
> the hole in the drive, so we could work around it, such as backups of
> everything except the software that straddled the hole.  No business data
was
> lost.
>
> In 1984 at another employer there was a power outage that damaged some IBM
OS
> objects on our hard drive, and damaged some parts of the hard drive.  This
> was on a S/34 at a 24x7 company & it took a week for IBM to do the
repairs.
> Basically the business continued running with us not doing some tasks like
> compresses, and 100% of the damaged objects were replaced.
>
> MacWheel99@aol.com (Alister Wm Macintyre) (Al Mac)
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