RE: DON'T TRY THIS AT HOME!

Dan,

I think this is one of the marvels of the 400.  One of our 400's has an
external bank of drives connected.  This 400 is the mirrored backup of one
of the production systems and is mainly just used for queries.  We came in
one morning and a lot of the processing on this box was 'hung', but some
jobs were continuing to run.  We were puzzled and when we went into the
computer room to investigate we found the plug on the external drives and
been accidentally pulled from the wall.  When we plugged it back in all the
jobs on the 400 that appeared 'hung' just took off and continued running.  I
was totally in awe that a bank of drives could be unplugged and the system
continues running, although it was a little behind :).

Scott Mildenberger

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Bale, Dan [mailto:D.Bale@handleman.com]
> Sent: Thursday, July 05, 2001 4:47 PM
> To: MIDRANGE-L@midrange.com
> Subject: DON'T TRY THIS AT HOME!
> 
> 
> I just had to share this with the group.
> 
> One of our branches (same one with the missing panel key I 
> mentioned in
> a previous post) has a 9406-510 with an expansion box that houses
> additional EMC dasd as well as the 3590 media library.  For 
> some reason,
> the expansion box was never plugged into the UPS, even though 
> there was
> a socket for it and the UPS had more than enough capacity for it.  I
> wondered for awhile if the wall socket the expansion box was plugged
> into was itself protected somehow, but was told by the electrical
> engineer at the branch that it was highly unlikely.
> 
> I had reasons for doubting him, though.  This branch suffers power
> outages on a frequent basis, maybe once every two weeks for up to 10
> minutes per occurrence.  The 400 never misses a beat and, since the
> expansion box houses dasd for the AS/400, I figured that there was no
> way the system could continue to run if those drives ever lost power.
> The thing about that, though, was that the 3590 always had to be reset
> from its panel after a power loss before the 400 could again 
> communicate
> with it.
> 
> Since this branch was several hours away, it was not feasible 
> for me to
> make the trip to do this.  I had to work around the branch electrical
> engineer's schedule, which (to make a long story short) was not
> feasible.  Finally, I had been directed by my boss to "make 
> it happen".
> I was able to talk the office manager to come in on the July 
> 4th holiday
> to power down the system, pull the expansion box plug from 
> the wall and
> into the UPS.  
> 
> But Mother Nature beat us to the punch.  Last Thursday, the branch
> suffered a huge power surge (so I was told) and, according to our
> interpretation of some SRC codes, had knocked out our workstation
> controllers.  After trying a lot of different things to bring the
> controllers back up without success, it was decided that we should IPL
> the system.  Because we had no signon screen anywhere, we 
> would have to
> do it from the system panel.  "Oh, BTW", I suggested, "Why 
> not move the
> expansion box to the UPS after you power down and before powering back
> up and save us from having to deal with it on a holiday?"  
> (Mind you, I
> was third party to all of this since all my communications were via an
> email pager as I was chugging along down I-75 on vacation.)  
> So, that's
> what they did.  "Powered down" the 400 by pushing the white square
> button on the panel, unplugged the expansion box & plugged it into the
> UPS, went back to power up the 400, but WAIT!, there's a signon screen
> at the system console!  The office manager signed on, and everything
> worked fine, save for a few workstation jobs that had to be killed
> manually.  Apparently, just pushing the power button does 
> nothing, but I
> was presuming that my "sub" (my other AS/400 colleague here at
> corporate) was leading the office manager through the steps 
> required to
> power down the 400 - Oh well!  And the 3590 had to be reset from its
> panel.  Hmmm.
> 
> Needless to say, I was rather skeptical about this when I got 
> that final
> page.  I finally got on the phone and called my sub to see 
> what was up,
> and he confirmed that all was well and up & running.
> 
> As far as I was aware, the expansion boxes do not have any 
> UPS built in.
> Do the EMC drives have their own UPS'?
> 
> - Dan 
> Dan Bale says "BAN DALE!"
> IT - AS/400
> Handleman Company
> 248-362-4400  Ext. 4952
> D.Bale@Handleman.com
>   Quiquid latine dictum sit altum viditur.
>   (Whatever is said in Latin seems profound.)
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