Re: The Insane Operator has struck again

On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 2:04 PM, Kevin Monceaux <[email protected]> wrote:

>
> Did you have to bring back such memories?
>

Sorry, In payment I offer a like story..

I was a VAX system operator and I would go in on weekends because then I
could work on my
own projects as nobody was generally around. I was sitting at my desk
happily working a way
on a command history for VMS 3.0 (Which didn't have one) in DCL, when my
terminal started
getting messages from the kernel "ummm - I cant find the system volume..." .
I thought "That's not
good" and made my way to the computer room.

As I opened the door and walked up the ramp I noticed a brown haze hanging
just below the
cileing. The system volume was on one of those old dishwasher sized hard
drives, this one happened
to have a clear lid, I looked inside and was somewhat surpsrised to see a
bright shiney ring of bare
metal about half way out between the drive hub and the edge of the platters.
Thing was still spinning
but the attention light was blinking and the console decwriter was printing
over and over again
"unable to read the system volume"

Called my Boss, He was able to get a shiney new 400 mb (twice the size of
the original system volume)
installed and working by monday morning.) Got attaboys for being there to
raise the alarm in time.
no production downtime resulted. I had just done friday night's full backups
too!

After that we had a system volume and a shadow volume that the system volume
was copied to each
night by automatic batch job. Made fixing "oh help I just deleted my group's
most important file" fixes
much easier.