More snippets from the field

[Peter Coffin <phcoffin@xxxxxxxxxx>]

[ Some quick background: alt.sysadmin.recovery is a USENET
newsgroup with a charter of providing a forum for system admin
people to blow of steam. Consquently, there's seldom praise for
*anything*. As you all can probably guess, there's not a whole
lot of mention of the AS/400. In fact, I think this is the first
time I remember, and it's as positive as a grudging admission
that something worked the way it was supposed to can be. ]

Subject:     Re: ATX-Power-Supply
From:        Georg Bauer <gb@hugo.westfalen.de>
Newsgroups:  alt.sysadmin.recovery
Date:        Tue, 14 Apr 1998 18:21:01 GMT

In article <0fhg3w4szd.fsf@humulus.daimi.aau.dk>, Lars Balker Rasmussen
<lars@rasmussen.org> wrote:

>Speaking of power failures:  Imagine, if you can, an ATM router not on
>an UPS...

Or imagine, if you can, a Token-Ring-bridge, 1 AS/400, 5 Novell servers
and 7 NT servers on an non-UPS. Broken batteries - and that dreaded thing
does a test on the batteries about every hour - by running all connected
devices from the batteries. Yuck. Must have been really funny over the
weekend: every hour or so all machines were hard rebooted. Since some of
them are Novell servers with mirrored drives, those machines were rebooted
within the remirroring process. Producing more damage to the filesystem
with every reboot. Consequently two of the Novell servers didn't come up
again. Although I must admit that I was positively impressed of what
vrepair (Novell-fsck) was able to recover - normally I would have expected
vrepair to do even more damage to the file system.

But what impressed me the most: the AS/400 didn't even need to recover
it's database. Ok, actually the internal UPS of the AS/400 kicked in and
saved the day, but I wouldn't have expected that it really worked (looks
just _too_ cute in it's little box).

Maybe now I can convince my PHB to install something that gives a signal
to the outside when something in the serverroom fails ... (every
marketing-guy has a mobile phone and a notebook - but system
administration? Nah, that's not needed, we don't need system
administration full-week. Aaargh. Maybe now he accepts that sytem-failures
give a damn on weekends and holidays.)

bye, Georg

--
#!/usr/bin/perl -0777pi
s/TS:.*?\0/$_=$&;y,a-z, ,;s,   $,true,gm;s, 512,2048,;$_/es


Peter H. Coffin
T/L 665-6298 (414)223-6298
phcoffin@us.ibm.com
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