RE: I should have bought a lottery tickets! -- MIDRANGE-L

Ken, with the luck you had, you saved money by 'not' buying a lottery
ticket.   :-)

Ray Shahan

"Life is what happens while you're busy making other plans", John Lennon

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Graap, Ken [SMTP:keg@nwnatural.com]
> Sent: Tuesday, November 19, 2002 5:34 PM
> To:   'Midrange'
> Subject:      I should have bought a lottery tickets!
>
> So, what are the odds of having a power supply fail in a 5065 tower?  ...
> IBM says... "quite high... and if one does, the 5065 has three of them and
> only needs one to operate" ... Yea, right!
>
> Well, my luck was running high this week then.
>
> I installed a new 5065 tower on Saturday in order to attach a bunch of new
> disk drives to our system.
>
> When we attached the tower to our system and started the IPL, it failed to
> power up because one of the power supplies failed. I thought, "That's odd,
> there are three power supplies in a 5065 tower. How could one bad one
> prevent the tower from powering up?"
>
> I asked our friends at IBM this question and their reply was "The first
> time
> a 5065 tower powers up, all three of the power supplies have to be
> operational or it won't work!"  OK then ... Lets get a replacement!
>
> Our IBM CE, frantically trying to find a power supply replacement, finally
> tells me that one has to flown in from somewhere in New Mexico.... Oh no!
> What are we going to do now?
>
> I guess our disk upgrade is on hold....
>
> I then had a thought. We have six 5065 towers. Each tower has 3 power
> supplies. A 5065 tower can run on one power supply right?  <smile>
>
> I suggested that we pull a power supply from an existing tower and use it
> in
> the new tower. We did this and it worked!
>
> I was able to move on with our disk upgrade... We scheduled a time the
> following day to replace the power supply we had "borrowed" from the other
> tower...
>
> Life was good. We beat the odds.... Whew!
>
> The next day, we power off the system, add the new power supply and IPL.
> Total down time less than an hour. Cool .... No problems.... How easy can
> it
> be?
>
> Twenty four hours later, I get a call from my computer operator. The
> system
> is down! Right as we are in the middle of our nightly posting run! What
> could possibility have caused this to happen?
>
> Another power supply failure!!!!! The one that was installed just the
> other
> day!  Wow! Two power supplies in two days. What are the odds of that
> happening? Billions to one?
>
> I call IBM and found out there is another situation where the triple
> redundancy power supply configuration in the 5065 isn't effective.... If a
> power supply fails with a "hard short" it will power down the tower "no
> matter what" ... IBM responds quickly though, replaces the power supply
> and
> tries to make me feel better by saying that the odds of this happening
> again
> in our lifetime is millions to one!!!!   Yea right ... millions to one
> ....
>
> What luck I've had in the last 48 hours ..... I should have purchased a
> lottery ticket!
>
> Kenneth
>
> ****************************************
> Kenneth E. Graap
> IBM Certified Specialist
> AS/400e Professional System Administrator
> NW Natural (Gas Services)
> keg@nwnatural.com
> Phone: 503-226-4211 x5537
> FAX:    603-849-0591
> ****************************************
>
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