Your worst I.T. nightmare

["Wes Reinhold" <WesR@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Some of you may have noticed in the news that eastern North Carolina was
hit by series of tornados last Sat. afternoon. Our town, Sanford NC,
looked like a war zone.   The building that houses our computer room was
totally demolished.  Fortunately the computer room was in a fortified,
secure area and had a raised floor.  By extraordinary effort, working
all night, the guys were able to literally dig out the Iseries and
network servers, set them up in a separate building and get them back on
line.  Our offices in the UK and South Africa did not experience any
loss of service.

Makes you recall all the discussions about disaster and disaster
recovery.  In the back of your mind you keep saying 'but this won't
happen to me.'
Be advised....it can.  Prepare for the worst, hope for the best.

-----Original Message-----
From: midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of PaulMmn
Sent: Tuesday, April 19, 2011 10:06 AM
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion
Cc: rob@xxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: Near-fatal OOPS waiting to happen in PDM (or THANK GOD
forCONFIRMATION SCREENS!)

We have a menu application (EasyMenu-- it's ANCIENT!) that lets us 
change menus on-the-fly; no recompiling.  We had a bunch of 
accounting options available to finance folks at various locations. 
Some of the options would run the month-end close and other 
'innocent' options.

One user, who was authorized to those options, was an 'explorer--' he 
tried every option to see what they did.  And us with no confirmation 
screens!

We quickly added them behind most of our menu options.  All they do 
is say "If you press the  ENTER  key you will 'close the month for 
AP.'"  A second line, farther down, is active for programmers and 
shows the command that will be executed.  The program accepts 2 
parms:  the text telling what will happen, and the command to 
execute.  Prevented some nasty re-occurances of exploration panic!

--Paul E Musselman
PaulMmn@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx