DON'T TRY THIS AT HOME! -- MIDRANGE-L

I just had to share this with the group.

One of our branches (same one with the missing panel key I mentioned in
a previous post) has a 9406-510 with an expansion box that houses
additional EMC dasd as well as the 3590 media library.  For some reason,
the expansion box was never plugged into the UPS, even though there was
a socket for it and the UPS had more than enough capacity for it.  I
wondered for awhile if the wall socket the expansion box was plugged
into was itself protected somehow, but was told by the electrical
engineer at the branch that it was highly unlikely.

I had reasons for doubting him, though.  This branch suffers power
outages on a frequent basis, maybe once every two weeks for up to 10
minutes per occurrence.  The 400 never misses a beat and, since the
expansion box houses dasd for the AS/400, I figured that there was no
way the system could continue to run if those drives ever lost power.
The thing about that, though, was that the 3590 always had to be reset
from its panel after a power loss before the 400 could again communicate
with it.

Since this branch was several hours away, it was not feasible for me to
make the trip to do this.  I had to work around the branch electrical
engineer's schedule, which (to make a long story short) was not
feasible.  Finally, I had been directed by my boss to "make it happen".
I was able to talk the office manager to come in on the July 4th holiday
to power down the system, pull the expansion box plug from the wall and
into the UPS.  

But Mother Nature beat us to the punch.  Last Thursday, the branch
suffered a huge power surge (so I was told) and, according to our
interpretation of some SRC codes, had knocked out our workstation
controllers.  After trying a lot of different things to bring the
controllers back up without success, it was decided that we should IPL
the system.  Because we had no signon screen anywhere, we would have to
do it from the system panel.  "Oh, BTW", I suggested, "Why not move the
expansion box to the UPS after you power down and before powering back
up and save us from having to deal with it on a holiday?"  (Mind you, I
was third party to all of this since all my communications were via an
email pager as I was chugging along down I-75 on vacation.)  So, that's
what they did.  "Powered down" the 400 by pushing the white square
button on the panel, unplugged the expansion box & plugged it into the
UPS, went back to power up the 400, but WAIT!, there's a signon screen
at the system console!  The office manager signed on, and everything
worked fine, save for a few workstation jobs that had to be killed
manually.  Apparently, just pushing the power button does nothing, but I
was presuming that my "sub" (my other AS/400 colleague here at
corporate) was leading the office manager through the steps required to
power down the 400 - Oh well!  And the 3590 had to be reset from its
panel.  Hmmm.

Needless to say, I was rather skeptical about this when I got that final
page.  I finally got on the phone and called my sub to see what was up,
and he confirmed that all was well and up & running.

As far as I was aware, the expansion boxes do not have any UPS built in.
Do the EMC drives have their own UPS'?

- Dan 
Dan Bale says "BAN DALE!"
IT - AS/400
Handleman Company
248-362-4400  Ext. 4952
D.Bale@Handleman.com
  Quiquid latine dictum sit altum viditur.
  (Whatever is said in Latin seems profound.)
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