I should have bought a lottery tickets!

So, what are the odds of having a power supply fail in a 5065 tower?  ...
IBM says... "quite high... and if one does, the 5065 has three of them and
only needs one to operate" ... Yea, right!

Well, my luck was running high this week then.

I installed a new 5065 tower on Saturday in order to attach a bunch of new
disk drives to our system.

When we attached the tower to our system and started the IPL, it failed to
power up because one of the power supplies failed. I thought, "That's odd,
there are three power supplies in a 5065 tower. How could one bad one
prevent the tower from powering up?"

I asked our friends at IBM this question and their reply was "The first time
a 5065 tower powers up, all three of the power supplies have to be
operational or it won't work!"  OK then ... Lets get a replacement!

Our IBM CE, frantically trying to find a power supply replacement, finally
tells me that one has to flown in from somewhere in New Mexico.... Oh no!
What are we going to do now?

I guess our disk upgrade is on hold....

I then had a thought. We have six 5065 towers. Each tower has 3 power
supplies. A 5065 tower can run on one power supply right?  <smile>

I suggested that we pull a power supply from an existing tower and use it in
the new tower. We did this and it worked!

I was able to move on with our disk upgrade... We scheduled a time the
following day to replace the power supply we had "borrowed" from the other
tower...

Life was good. We beat the odds.... Whew!

The next day, we power off the system, add the new power supply and IPL.
Total down time less than an hour. Cool .... No problems.... How easy can it
be?

Twenty four hours later, I get a call from my computer operator. The system
is down! Right as we are in the middle of our nightly posting run! What
could possibility have caused this to happen?

Another power supply failure!!!!! The one that was installed just the other
day!  Wow! Two power supplies in two days. What are the odds of that
happening? Billions to one?

I call IBM and found out there is another situation where the triple
redundancy power supply configuration in the 5065 isn't effective.... If a
power supply fails with a "hard short" it will power down the tower "no
matter what" ... IBM responds quickly though, replaces the power supply and
tries to make me feel better by saying that the odds of this happening again
in our lifetime is millions to one!!!!   Yea right ... millions to one ....

What luck I've had in the last 48 hours ..... I should have purchased a
lottery ticket!

Kenneth

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Kenneth E. Graap
IBM Certified Specialist
AS/400e Professional System Administrator
NW Natural (Gas Services)
keg@nwnatural.com
Phone: 503-226-4211 x5537
FAX:    603-849-0591
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