Wednesday, July 8, 2009

(iSeries Blunders) Part III

December 14th, 2005 by ReiVi
Source : http://techblog.livingatrandom.com

There was this one time that I was at a client site doing some programming work. I noticed that one of the system operators was removing and then re-inserting a cartridge from the AS/400’s tape drive. He would walk back to the main console and type something. Shaking his head he would go through the entire process again.

After a few more minutes, I heard him mutter what sounded like a mixture of a curse and thank you.

I couldn’t take it anymore, so I asked him what happened.

Apparently, he was trying to initialize the tape in preparation for a backup. Whenever he typed the INZTAP command on the console, it would return an error that there was no tape in the drive. He removed and re-inserted the tape. He even tried using brand new tapes to no avail. Finally, he decided to signoff of the AS/400. Just before signing back-in, he noticed that he was connected to the remote AS/400 all that time.

He was very thankful that there was no tape on the remote (production environment) AS/400. If there’d been one — and it contained important data — he would have unknowingly erased it’s contents.

Lesson learned: If you work for a company that has multiple AS/400’s — whether local or remote — make sure that you are connected to the correct machine before doing anything.

1 comment:

  1. good one... but i dont think anyone would make such a simple mistake

    ReplyDelete