RE: Preventative Maintenance For AS400

> Abnormal terminations?  You mean like my doing an ENDJOB of a large IFS 
> save?  After waiting 30 minutes for the ENDJOB to take affect I did an 
> ENDJOBABN and that killed it.  When the lynch mob arrived the next day and

> let me know that it left a shipload of ifs objects locked we scheduled an 
> ipl for that night.  So, does 2 hours notice of an IPL count as scheduled 
> or unscheduled downtime?  It was decided that we couldn't even wait until 
> the IPL scheduled for this weekend, (which we do every 8 weeks).

LOL!  I guess that's simply something I've never stepped into....  But then
again, shortly after getting into I/S I started the process of burning
seldom used folders to CD (3 copies, one for I/S, one for the controller,
one for the assistant controller) and purging them off the system.  

They thought I was nuts, but four years later they're admitting that the CDs
haven't been needed more than five times.  In the meantime we've saved
downtime every night saving data that never changed anyway. As a plus,
accounting has finally learned to segregate data by job function
(Controller, Asst. Controller, Cost, etc.) as opposed to user name("Danny's
Files, Joe's files, etc.), and further split standarized published report
libraries from working directories for personal use. 

On the standard AS/400 library side, I'll admit to going a little overboard,
but I took DASD on the old box from 90% down to 32% before I quit.  No
cheating, no additional drives, just saves of obsolete data and purging off
the system.  Only ever had to restore three files, none of those critical.
It still amazes me that a place would require a software package like
Turnover to "ensure that programmer objects aren't used by production
processes" and ten years later they still have libraries belonging to
programmers who worked for the company ten months back in 1995.  As if
anybody would even remember to find something there...

Now mind you!  I'm not recommending this for anybody else.  I certainly
covered my rear end by multiple backups and a very methodical process of
checking last date used, dependencies as shown in APLUS, tentatively
changing object names, then library names, then purging from the system.
When done over the course of a year we managed to check every object in
non-IBM and non-approved third party package libraries.