Re: backups on AS/400; part2 -- MIDRANGE-L

I am the only full time 400 person at my employer.
There is another person who handles the PC internet side & they want me to 
take over some of his duties.

I show up in the afternoon, then after everyone has left, I run SAVE-21 & I 
do not leave until it is completed & security console signed off, although I 
have been known to leave the building for a meal break while SAVE-21 is 
running.

Things that are a bit annoying to me regarding what is done when I am on 
vacation.

"Al, I got everything done except the backup.  I just did not have time for 
that."
Good - Murphy's Law was not harrassing you ... usually if we do a backup we 
do not need it.

"Al, we started the backup, left it running, went home.  Something went 
wrong, we do not know what, then first people in morning went to main 
console" (which was left signed on overnight as security officer) "signed it 
off / on & did their thing with BPCS or printer, so we lost log on what the 
problem was."

However, usually things ran fine.
DSPLOG is a God Send for scrolling through time period of a backup.
I do not read all the stuff, just enough to see that a backup was run & the 
error messages were not fatal.

Nina gave me idea for another survey question
> Have we just been really lucky doing release updates?  
> I've never had any problems.

A survey question might be:
What kind of AS/400 backup do you run? ... SAVE-21 GO BACKUP some CL 
concoction, 3rd party system
What time do you do backup?
Do you do unattended backup & is there any security on the security?  in 
other words do you leave the console signed on overnight as master security 
officer?

We have a lock on the computer room door - which contains several things 
including main console and main printer - the only time this lock is used is 
when someone is printing confidential reports - someone whose head cannot 
penetrate the fact that we have not secured spool files so that by locking 
the door you make people curious enough to look at the reports on-line to 
figure out what you are trying to hide.

At a former employer they had a JANITOR trained to do the backup at MIDNIGHT 
which had been deemed best time for it (lowest demand on system) and he had a 
list of phone #s to call if anything went wrong.  Needless to say, I was 
called in several nites a week.  This was on a S36.

MacWheel99@aol.com (Alister Wm Macintyre) (Al Mac)


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