Re: Data Corruption / 400 -- MIDRANGE-L

On an AS/400 since 1995. @ unscheduled down times. One for a bad disk, the 
other for a bad board. Both times, systme repaired and back online within 3 
hours. No data lost ever.Period.

>>> <MacWheel99@aol.com> 04/08/02 04:29PM >>>
Has anyone EVER suffered data corruption on their 400 business data bases or
ever heard of it happening for some reason other than failure of hard drives,
damaged objects, human error, software bugs, PC user in middle of doing some
update & the connection gets lost & the software was not written good enough
to recover from that scenario, malicious activity like hacker or someone who
lost their job & took improper action?

Feel free to reply to me off list about this.

I have a collegue who is in a heated discussion on in some list in the PC
Windows Macintosh world.  They apparently take it for granted that reality is
that there are operating system crashes all the time that scramble business
data.  My friend says that in his many decades experience in the IBM world,
this has NEVER happened there.

These Microsoft enthusiasts are flatly disbelieving him ... it must be a
fluke for him.  So he looking for a quick poll ... how many years experience
someone in IBM 400 & its predecessor platforms & how many times has this
happened to you?  So that he can then say to these guys ... well X people in
the 400 community who said they have Y aggregate years have only heard of
this happening however many times.  So if it is a fluke, here is how many
other people are having that fluke.

In my personal over 40 years in this world, it has only happened once.

We got our % disk space utilization significantly above 100 % by accident,
during our Y2K conversion in 1998, primarily because our estimates for disk
space needed for multiple Pilots & conversion efforts were too low, related
to OS/400 math being off on what the M36 was taking, a lot of stuff was
weird.  We didn't care to spend any time figuring it out.  Our goal was to
fix it & fast, which we did.  The problem was discovered one day.  We got it
below 100% in less than 24 hours, identified corrupted data & recovered it
from our backups.

I also remember a hard disk failure from old age ... it was a 13 years old
IBM hard drive & IBM's mean time to failure was 10 years.  IBM helped us map
the hole in the drive, so we could work around it, such as backups of
everything except the software that straddled the hole.  No business data was
lost.

In 1984 at another employer there was a power outage that damaged some IBM OS
objects on our hard drive, and damaged some parts of the hard drive.  This
was on a S/34 at a 24x7 company & it took a week for IBM to do the repairs.
Basically the business continued running with us not doing some tasks like
compresses, and 100% of the damaged objects were replaced.

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