Failures at power-up time (was Re: Reclaiming Storage...Re-booting Regularly)

Rob:

I have no disagreement. To me, the point becomes important when planning basic 
recovery after power loss, not necessarily PWRDWNSYS RESTART(NO).

I became sensitive to the issue a number of years ago at a remote site that 
suffered regular, lengthy losses of utility power. The outages often exceeded 
the UPS limits and powering down got invoked by the monitoring program.

It was never pleasant to find the system unable to come back up due to a 
hardware failure that was triggered by the loss and return of power. Is that 
enough reason to schedule regular tests? It's simply another factor for sites 
to consider. Would errors such as the old 9332 failures be detected _without_ 
physically powering them off/on? I have no idea, but the problem was long ago 
explained to me as being related to the physical stop and start of rotation. 
Power regulators might have similar limits for diagnostics.

Tom Liotta

midrange-l-request@midrange.com wrote:

>First, I am all in favor of a regular IPL.  But, hasn't it been said that
>the hardest thing on a computer is stopping it, and starting it?  If you
>are under maintenance, and you do your IPL's at off times, it shouldn't be
>a major concern.
>
>Rob Berendt
>--
>
>qsrvbas@netscape.net (Tom Liotta)
>
>Good point to remember. And it reminded me that I used to see both DASD
>and power problems highlighted when we'd use PWRDWNSYS RESTART(*NO).
>Actually shutting down and then physically restarting would sometimes make
>problems visible. I recall the old 9332s being notorious for failures
>under that scenario. Power regulators seemed more susceptible also.
>
>Obviously this isn't done without a schedule, just in case.
>
>Tom Liotta
>
>midrange-l-request@midrange.com wrote:
>
>>I didn't see this mentioned, but an IPL will do a very complete
>>hardware check that simply doesn't occur in the normal course of
>>events. While not a "show stopper", I think it helps from time
>>to time to root out "possible hardware problems".

--
Tom Liotta
The PowerTech Group, Inc.
19426 68th Avenue South
Kent, WA 98032
Phone  253-872-7788
Fax    253-872-7904
http://www.powertechgroup.com


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