Sysadmin sank IBM mainframe by going one VM too deep Welcome to another glimpse inside the dark-curtained (in)box that is "Who, me?" – El Reg's confessional column in which readers seek penance for sins of the past. This week, meet "George", who many years ago was one of two sysadmins in the office products division of a three-letter computer company. And was bored. Bored, bored …
Scientists, not as good at following instructions as you think
Your mistake was not prefixing the instructions with an Abstract, adding a few references to random publications and putting in on arxiv.org for peer review. It may not have made any difference in the long run but they may have actually read it...
"Scientists, not as good at following instructions as you think"
Oh indeed ! I could name you dozens of examples where I've been on the other end of the phone to Senior Professors who couldn't find their way out of a paper bag when it comes to subjects outside their area of expertise (such as making the great scientific discovery that YES, the map and address of the event has already been published on the website on the event page ...... no, instead they ring me or my colleagues instead quite literally asking "Where is the event taking place?" ).
Oh indeed ! I could name you dozens of examples where I've been on the other end of the phone to Senior Professors
You obviously failed to read the orientation leaflet.
PhD student: Knows Everything
Associated Professor: Knows Everything in one narrow well defined area
Senior Professor: Knows where the Associated Professor(s) and PhD Student(s) are at any given time.
I have heard it from my dad (Senior Professor, Differential equations and Optimal Control).
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It goes along with the job description.
However, I once found the bug that was being exploited by a group of developers to crash the system so they'd get home in time for Monday Night Football. I patched it Sunday night ... and was extremely unpopular at that shop for a couple months ... not that I cared, I was the consultant, we're not supposed to be popular :-)
Back in the 1980s I was working in a company that was using Unisys kit (actually rebadged Convergent Technology systems) running CTOS. These could be "clustered" together into small networks. Downstairs, the boss and admin staff used a system that consisted of a network consisting of a master computer, with the hard disks attached, and two or three networked slave machines. Upstairs, each developer had a single computer but one developer (let's call him Derek, mainly because that was his name) had quite a powerful system.
When the downstairs master computer had a problem the boss decided that Derek's computer would have to act as the master computer for a while. Derek did warn them that, in the process of developing software, it was possible that we would often crash the computers, but the boss wasn't deterred. Derek had also discovered (via the CTOS API manuals) that there was a system call the forced a deliberate crash. He wrote a small program to call that API and every so often, when he was bored or whatever, would whisper to the rest of the developers (who were safely isolated on their own systems) something like, "Listen for the shouts downstairs." Then he'd run the program to crash the network resulting in cries of anguish below. He's then shout out something like, "Sorry, but I did warn you that we often cause crashes."
It didn't take too long before a new spare computer was made available and Derek's system became disconnected from downstairs again.
I once took out a Beowulf cluster by changing my windows password. I mean, it was a /terrible/ setup, 80-odd PCs running windows XP, with regular user accounts - in this case muggins, hence the whole thing going south when my password changed - but it worked well enough most of the time.
And I'm not even a sysadmin! It's inevitable that if you have the power and the admin rights to break almost anything, you'll break *something* eventually.
Alan, I did just that. Complete with a message on the perp's screen to the effect of "Forget about it. Get back to work!". He hated me. He'd have hated me more if I hadn't talked his boss out of firing him for the stupid stunt.
Wow. That brings back memories.
As a graduate student in high energy physics, I got my very own 3270 terminal, connected to the mainframe downstairs by twinax cables.
Best keyboard I have ever had.
Many joyful days running virtual machines under CMS. I remember the REIPL CMS command to reboot (Initial Program Load). It probably would all come back if I got a 3270 in front of me!
In later days I got a FALCO terminal at CERN. VT220 emulation, plus a hotkey to Tektronix graphics emulation. I used a 3270 emulator on DEC VMS to access the mainframes there.
Can confirm.
I have a Unicomp EnduraPro (USB cabled reproduction IBM M13 (the one with the tracpoint) in black with grey caps) for my work keyboard.
It sounds like an ammo depot cooking off when I start typing in earnest.
So far, the office mates haven't had any real issue with it. :)
The original model M is someplace in the black hole of storage at the house...
Northgate Computer systems had the best keyboard I ever used. It was my first PC, a 386 with 1 MB of RAM and two, count them, TWO 65 MB RLL hard drives. It only cost me $3,495. I later upgraded it to 4 MB of RAM by replacing around thirty-two discrete integrated circuits so I could run DesqVIEW. I used that keyboard for years.
"I later upgraded it to 4 MB of RAM by replacing around thirty-two discrete integrated circuits so I could run DesqVIEW."
You can be honest here - it was to run Wing Commander and we all know it.
(Mine's the one with the printout of the config.sys and autoexec.bat to get 632KB free base memory, with mouse support, in the pocket)
Get yourself an IBM Model M keyboard. And feel the "best keyboard" again!
I've not had first hand experience of one of these, but the same design, now with a USB interface
https://www.pckeyboard.com/page/product/UB40PGA
the above was from a reference by a commentard a few months ago.
Cherry keyboards are also pretty much up to scratch as a Model M.
I picked up a half bust one as part of a gayboy* full of ditched IT kit that I ethically recycled**, via eBay and assorted scrappies. About 60% of the keys worked.
Sent them an email, they felt it was still covered by warranty and as long as I sent the bust one back for QC review I got a free replacement. With brown keys, since I'm never sure if I want it hard or soft ;)
*a small skip :)
** the PMs plan was flytipping.
I was once working as a summer intern at IBM - editing a document in "PROFS" - did some formatting change and was waiting, waiting, waiting for the screen to update. Then the phone rings - it was an operator from the Warwick data center - asking me what I was doing, as it was taking up something like 95% cpu on the mainframe. Needless to say there was nothing much I could add - the process was terminated by the operator and I decided better to re-structure the document differently than attempt the same thing and trigger whatever the bug in the application again.
PROFS was XEDIT fancied up with a database to hold documents "centrally", but it was a known resource hog. It was initially seen (by IBM) as suitable for use by clerical level staff. Then it morphed into a do-all monster and imploded in on itself. Not a shining example of software technology from that era.
@VTAM (I'm sure I've just blocked a virtual route doing that)
"Not a shining example of software technology from that era."
You say that, but it would work on the end of a dodgy copper wire that SITA would string on trees in the arse end of nowhere. At least until the wire got nicked for the copper.
Not quite.
Older IBM mainframe terminals used a beamspring keyswitch. The IBM model F keyboard was a reduced cost version of that (the original IBM PC keyboard and a number of others) and the IBM model M keyboard was a reduced cost version of the model F.
Not that it's a bad keyboard - it's probably the best you can buy new today. Old beamsprings are rather rare, hideously expensive, and require "interesting" methods to adapt to modern computers (replace the controller with an Xwhatsit controller).
Agreed on the quality of IBM keyboards. Minor correction: 3270 technology used coax cables. And the CP command is "IPL" (Re-IPL is used as a verb).
And yup, it wouldn't take long to get back into the swing of old friends like EDGAR again (Edit Data Graphically And Recursively!). One little-remembered VM CP command was DIAL which was used in place of LOGON to put the terminal under control of a guest OS (eg ACP, Airline Control Program).
-Grayhaired VM/370 systems programmer
(Systems programmers write code, in BAL, that runs in privileged mode. I'm not a friggin 'admin' and I don't have to login as root. Don't call me admin or I'll delete your A-disk.)
del *.* in the root directory in the days of MS-DOS is the worst I ever did. On a colleagues PC at that! Easily fixed though, after a few moments of heart stopping panic. His autoexec.bat and config.sys were pretty much factory default and del *.* only deleted the files in root, not directories and as per normal practices, there was barely anything in root in terms of files.
In my final year at uni I had an Atari ST on which I wrote my dissertation. I then lent it to a friend to write hers. She had trouble saving it to the floppy disk so I went over to help. It said the disk was full so I grabbed another disk at random and saved dissert.doc on there. Just as the floppy kicked into gear I realised that it had my dissertation on it and it was called dissert.doc. Cue lots of panic and visions of having to rewrite the whole thing in three days. Then I realised that Atari created a copy called file.bak and was able to recover mine from there. It was a short but sharp brown underpants stuff and I don't think that my friend really twigged how serious it was.
Back in '95 I was working at a help desk where a number of colleagues from the Windows support team were upgrading their WfW 3.11 machines to Win95 (1,2), and a number of them were having issues copying the '95 install files to their machines over the network (3). The drive wasn't full, but the copy job was failing for everyone at just about the same spot in the file list.
I looked at the screen, and noted two things: They were at C:\> and the end of the dir/w showed 512 files and directories (max for the root of a FAT12 volume). On pointing this out the user of that machine typed in "del *.*" and was about to hit Enter when I yelled "Stop!" This got a bunch of angry glares (4), to which I said "Think about what that will do."
At which point I was (rather impolitely) told to go back over to my side of the call center.
1. Not me - I was happily running OS/2. Warp 3.0 on one machine (probably beta at that time), 2.11 on a PS/2 Mod70
2. No idea why they weren't doing a fresh install instead of an upgrade/migration
3. CDROM drives were scarce, so one person copied the CD to their system and everyone else was copying that directory to their local hard drive
4. There was a lot of animosity between the Windows and OS/2 support teams, and the fact I had identified the problem was already a poke in the eye.
At least the deflect blame bit, and got away with it.
I was working at a small company in mainland Europe and needed to plug in a new monitor or something. I took the power plug to my extension block and pushed it in, it wouldn't go, so I pushed harder. The plastic flexed and within the extension two wires touched. It was a modern building and so the trips for the floor went, no bangs or pops. The lights went out, the computers went off, and shortly after some angry people came walking down the corridor. They were four hours into a hardware debugging session apparently, not to mention other peoples work (maybe 20 or so) who were similarly inconvenienced.
I (for a few minutes at least) genuinely believed that I had a dodgy extension block and informed everybody that it was me, but that it wasn't my fault. A short while later the penny dropped, but I kept my mouth closed. I then proudly helped my boss put said extension block into the bin, and normality was restored. Or at least normal for that company, whatever that was...
I still cringe when I think of it, and I'm sure that said hardware developer would still find and kill me if he could trace me, so anonymous.
If uninsulated wires or bare terminals were close enough to each other that forceful handling* was able to cause a direct short, you DID have a dodgy extension block.
*If it involved liberating chunks of plaster and wall anchors, I might come back to that statement...
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