Upgrade Nightmare

[Doug Barnes <Doug.Barnes@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

After making initial offsite preparations I went to the customers location
to help them go from an F35 to a 600...

All was well, except the 8mm tape drive cable issue, see following.

After we determined we had the wrong cable (no cable) we started calling,
Mkt Rep (IBM), IBM, BGB, IBM CE but I couldn't get much help from IBM,
initially. Mkt Rep  returned my call but couldn't get a cable. I logged a
hardware service call, but their system was down. It was not going well.
I got a call sometime friday from Bill Mabbitt (IBM). He used to be our CE,
but is now in Rochester taking support calls on the phone. He happened to
see my name on a call list and he called me to see what was going on. He
ended up getting me back in touch wiith our CE, who had gotten my message
but was unable to reach me. CE finally located a cable and had it flown in
to Monroe, NC Sat. around 10AM.
The local CE out of Greenville did not appear too interested in trying to
help us much. Customer went up to I-85 NC/SC line and meet IBM CE. He got
the cable and we attempted to hook it up to new 400 a little after1 or so.
We got an EC=1100 error on the tape drive. After calling around we
determined the 7208-234 was at a lower level of microcode than it needed to
be. IBM could get us a tape, but it would take a week or better. The
Greenville (On-call) CE said we might could get the PTF from IBM on the F35
through the ECS modem, if the current code on the drive wasn't too old it
might update. He did not sound real optimistic. At that point I figured I
was going to be going back to Abbeville on another weekend. We downloaded
the PTF and sure enough it worked. The 7208 got the updated code and we
were off to the races. About 24 hours behind schedule, but we were back on
track. By around 1 am I had their new 400 up and running with a current set
of PTFs and all their data. We began hooking PCs to the system via CA/400.
most all of them worked, except for file transfers. I am working w/IBM on
that now.


Doug Barnes
Mid-Range Systems Engineer
Rock Hill Telephone Company
330 East Black Street
Rock Hill, Soth Carolina 29730
(803) 324-6231  voice
(803) 324-6142  fax

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