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iSeries Blunders Part III December 14, 2005

Posted by Rei Victor dela Cruz in : iSeries, iSeries Blunders , comments closed

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.

iSeries Blunders Part II August 22, 2005

Posted by Rei Victor dela Cruz in : iSeries, iSeries Blunders , comments closed

Have you ever worked on two programs at the same time? You are coding this current requirement when a user comes up to you from behind and blurts out, “Can you fix this? We just need an additional column on the report. My boss needed it yesterday.” Sound familiar? Knowing that it won’t take you an hour to do the modification, you agree.

Now, the thing here is, you are using a dumb terminal. Since you don’t want to exit your current task and mess up all the library list settings and stuff, you decide to use the dumb terminal next to it. You open the code up in SEU and start coding.

All of a sudden, you remembered the user never gave you the change request form. Your boss gave everyone a briefing on the subject just the other day. Setting, the keyboard aside, you call the user and request for the necessary paperwork.

While waiting for the change request to arrive, you decide to go back to your original task. Reaching for the keyboard, you start to type. But nothing happens. You hit the reset key. Still nothing. In desperation you start hitting random keys with your fingers like you are touch typist gone mad! Nothing’s happening.

“Oh no! I haven’t even saved my work yet! That’s almost a half-day’s work!”, you murmer to yourself.

As you hang your head, you glance at the other terminal and notice that the screen is garbled. What used to be code is now a jumbled mess of letters and numbers!

“What happened?”, you ask yourself in horror.

Tracing the cable of the keyboard you are using, you realize that you were using the keyboard for the other terminal!

“This has got to be the worse day in my life. Now I messed up two program codes!”

With a prayer you press F5 to refresh the screen.

The jumbled screen refreshes and you see your code, you say a short prayer thanking the heavens for your good fortune. Just then the user arrives with the change request.

iSeries Blunders Part I August 20, 2005

Posted by Rei Victor dela Cruz in : iSeries, iSeries Blunders , comments closed

Since this is my first article, I decided to look back at my career. Starting out in 1996 with a small IT company, I was a fresh graduate and like other graduates, I had no idea what an AS/400 (which is what they called the iSeries back then) was. Naturally, I was pretty excited. When I say this big refrigerator in the middle of the room, I said to myself, “Cool! I get to program using a mainframe!” The other trainees and I were told later that day however, that it was a midrange.

“Huh? A mid-what?”

Since our exposure in college was focused on PC’s and DOS (Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was that long ago), we only had a rough idea of what other platforms were. Heck, we thought mainframes belonged to musuems even then. The dumb terminals that were assigned to us were really big…about the size of a microwave oven.

Eventually, the other trainees and I went through…well…training. We were all coding happily one day when one of us suddenly had an endless loop in a piece of code. No problem! Just press Ctrl-C or Ctrl-Break. But how? There isn’t even a Ctrl key!

Since it was almost time to go home anyway, we all suggested to our colleague, “Just turn the terminal off and we’ll go home. You can find the bug tomorrow.”

Imagine our suprise when we were all called down to our boss’ office the following day. We found out the hard way that turning the terminal off doesn’t necessarily end the job. We all were given a long lecture on how to use the System-Request key.