🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <129...@sun.Eng.Sun.COM> mcgrew@sun.UUCP (Darin McGrew) writes:
>I had a summer job operating the EMCS (Energy Monitoring and
>Control System) at Fort Ord (CA).  It consisted of two HP 1000's
>connected by a proprietary interface, and hundreds of Z80 based
>field units.
<deleted story about the problems involved in sanely bringing up a
 distributed system>

Although not very similar, your subject line reminded me of an interesting
incident that occured at an academic site that I was involved with.  This
site was a large IBM VM shop, with most of the computing done at the central
campus.  However, they had several smaller machines at the other campuses
that ran unattended.  The operator at the main campus ran the machine
remotely.  Of course, the only work that couldn't be done remotely was
printer feeding and the rare tape mount, so students were hired to tend to
these necessities.  However, they were not expected (read allowed) to do the
normal operator functions, such as shutdowns, etc, as these were done by the
full-time staff.

Some background:  when a VM system crashes or is shut down and is brought
back up, you have three options for the type of restart you can do:  Warm
start (look in a save area for volatile data structures from the last
shutdown), Checkpoint (look in your save area for these volatiles, but don't
trust them), or Cold Start (come up as a virgin system, no volatile data
structures such as spool files (mail) or temp disk space).  Well, over the
weekend, the remote campus had suffered a power failure and was without
juice for some period of time.  This was during the ~20 hours a week when
there weren't operators at the home site.  Well, this student operator,
we'll call him Fred, came in and took it upon himself to bring up the
system, quite against rules.  When the prompt for choosing the type of
restart, Fred thought, put his hand on the machine, and said to himself
"Hmm.  It's cold.  Better do a cold start," and restarted the machine wiping
out all the temporary disk space and mail files for the entire system.

>Darin McGrew			mcg...@Eng.Sun.COM
>Affiliation stated for identification purposes only.