Posts by CA_Diver 12 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Mar 2022
The customer who chronically "forgot" to load her site's tapes. I escalated to my manager, who wrote letters to her manager. Until the day they lost a drive, and had to go back a week to find a backup. Sometimes you have to burn your fingers to learn.
The customer who loaded their tapes as documented. Sometime in the last few months, the tape drive failed, the support staff who failed to check logs screamed for help. By some miracle, a year old tape had been write protected, the last time a restore was required. That tape, still in rotation, let us recover the system, and use transaction files to bring data to current day. Two weeks later, called by support staff trying to make a tape to migrate data for a new system. Backup was hung, holding tape drive allocated. Some people won't learn even when their fingers are burned.
I completed a risk review on a vendor who would be hosting company data. They used a third party hosting site to stage the application, and used a disk to disk backups to the next rack over. "What happens when an aircraft falls on your data center?" Made Purchasing require remote backups for our data. Annoyed vendor who believed data center would always be there.
Two incidents stand out, at one time I was open water swimming before the work day. Nothing like a quick dip in the Pacific to wake up. I kept business wardrobe on the hook behind my office door, so I could rinse off, dry on the way in and change. One day I arrived to find air conditioning out and systems crashed. I spend the morning in a Speedo, t-shirt and sandals putting things back together.
Decades ago, a customer with a PDP 11 had erratic system crashes. No remote debugging success, change of tape drive by field service after a supposed relationship to the backup yielded no resolution. With the customer becoming annoyed, we dispatched an engineer to the site. A day of connecting flights and the next day he arrived. We provided a three ring binder with documentation, "how you boot the system", "Making a daily backup, "Making a weekly backup" . . .Customer was resting the binder cover on the number pad of the system console. Multiple keys supported the cover without being depressed. A single key or two triggered a crash. The customer would then move the binder and read the system startup page.
If you ever used a MultiTech modem when 1200 or 2400 baud was high speed here's my secret support story.
I was adding Novel cards to an office. I put the cover on the IT director's desktop, and reached behind to plug in the keyboard, mouse, printer, modem. The power plug on a MultiTech power supply was the same barrel connector as the old "fat" keyboard plug. I had switched the two going by touch. Motherboard let out the magic smoke. Director was pleased, he bought a new upgraded machine.
Back in the 90's. After spending days trying to resolve why a customer's Program and Data Procesor kept hanging and crashing, I was dispatched. Our customer was getting frustrated and I scheduled a day of flying to the customer's site, and a night in a hotel.
I walked in to the see the procedure book we provided with the system open and the cover holding down the "Enter" key at the edge of the keyboard. Auto-repeat was flooding the console and eventually hanging the system.
" Now they're dying off, and increasingly desperate COBOL users were previously appealing for volunteers to help."
It's not a problem yet. When they stop relying on volunteers and offer to pay for hours, that's when you know there's a serious business issue.
*Icon: waiting to code until the wallet is in reach
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