RE: Upgrade Nightmare

Hey Doug - at least you got the right tape drive !  

I unpacked the boxes a few hours ago for my new S10 that arrived today
at 2pm.  It was promised for last Wednesday or Thursday, then yesterday
they finally found it and said it would be here today before noon.  When
the guy with the box finally showed up at 2pm I asked him if he'd taken
it on a Magical Mystery Tour.  He said "almost, it was loaded on a truck
headed for western Canada".
This was being shipped from IBM's Canadian main warehouse on 14th Avenue
in Markham, about 3 miles from my office.

The front cover (they are STILL using those cheap plastic covers with
the dinky little pieces that break off easily) was of course broken
already.  The cover over the disk drive bay was not installed correctly
(would have been removed in Rochester presumably to add additional
drives). Therefore the front cover would not install flat - so
apparently someone just forced it and broke the cheap plastic hooks that
are supposed to hold the sliding keylock piece in place.
And of course two of the little round flat plastic feet broke off as the
system was moved across the raised floor.

And the "piece de resistance" - the third box was supposed to contain
the 7208-222 external 8mm tape unit.
It contains a 7207 QIC-1000 External ¼" tape unit !   
I called IBM on it around 3pm.  Answer is basically "well, we may be
able to get you one on Monday".  That's when I need to have the
conversion FINISHED !

&%#%%^@#^&%^%    :-(

Guess I'll have to go spend Christmas Eve with the wife and kid after
all !    :-)


... Neil Palmer                                     AS/400~~~~~      
... NxTrend Technology - Canada     ____________          ___  ~     
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        -----Original Message-----
        From:   Doug Barnes [SMTP:Doug.Barnes@RHTelCo.Com]
        Sent:   Wednesday, December 24, 1997 2:54 PM
        To:     MIDRANGE-L@midrange.com
        Subject:        Upgrade Nightmare

        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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