Re: Data Corruption / 400

[James Rich <james@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, 8 Apr 2002 MacWheel99@aol.com wrote:

> Has anyone EVER suffered data corruption on their 400 business data bases or
> ever heard of it happening for some reason other than failure of hard drives,
> damaged objects, human error, software bugs, PC user in middle of doing some
> update & the connection gets lost & the software was not written good enough
> to recover from that scenario, malicious activity like hacker or someone who
> lost their job & took improper action?

I have seen an AS/400 crash once.  It was a model 150.  That was a weird
day - AS/400 crashing?  unheard of!  I have seen an AS/400 become
temporarily unuseable because a twinax display was acting up which created
thousands (millions?) of entries in a job log which ate up all the disk.

I *may* have heard of data corruption of the kind you are talking about,
but I wasn't working with that particular customer so I don't know for
sure.  But I cannot point to any incident ever and say with certainty that
the AS/400 corrupted any data.  It just doesn't happen.

> I have a collegue who is in a heated discussion on in some list in the PC
> Windows Macintosh world.  They apparently take it for granted that reality is
> that there are operating system crashes all the time that scramble business
> data.  My friend says that in his many decades experience in the IBM world,
> this has NEVER happened there.
>
> These Microsoft enthusiasts are flatly disbelieving him ... it must be a
> fluke for him.  So he looking for a quick poll ... how many years experience
> someone in IBM 400 & its predecessor platforms & how many times has this
> happened to you?  So that he can then say to these guys ... well X people in
> the 400 community who said they have Y aggregate years have only heard of
> this happening however many times.  So if it is a fluke, here is how many
> other people are having that fluke.

It may be that no amount of data or argument will dissuade them.  They may
be as attached to the choice of software as I am to my beloved linux and
GPL :)  (as long as its slackware with SGI's XFS filesystem and the latest
mozilla and gnome with windowmaker, etc. etc. etc.)

James Rich
james@eaerich.com