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Admin
Ignorance and stupidity this way
| | | | V
Admin
HAI GUYS. IM UR NEW MANEFRAME CODERz.
Admin
haha, I can writez codez??
Admin
/END IGNORANCE AND STUPIDITY
Meaningful discussion and commentary this way:
| | | | | V
Admin
Not likely. Masterfully written. A beautiful tale of intrigue. Bravo.
captcha: jugis... jugis inDEED
Admin
And twtf is what? The kid screwed up, big deal. I want to know what The Sorcerer did to fix the problem.
Admin
It is widely know that when summoning demons to bind them to your command, even a little mistake in the summoning pentacle can cost you your life and soul.
So beware, dabblers of dark arts....
Admin
Not really a WTF (more like an honest, easy-to-make mistake), but an excellent story. I can appreciate that sinking feeling you get when you realize things have just gone from bad to worse.
Admin
Comparing the core dumps to the mops in Fantasia was a great idea. I loved this story.
Also, it had nothing to do with cleaning ladies unplugging servers. Hooray!
Admin
Admin
If the Sorceror really was a professional, he would have shown poor Rod what he did to fix it. Here was a guy who was willing to do the work, he just made an honest mistake. I wish I had more people like that around me; here, most folks just bitch and whine for someone else to fix it. Besides, what happens when (if?) the Sorceror goes on vacation? What if he leaves? Then the company would be really screwed.
It's appropriate that he's called a Sorceror. Rather than relying on reason, they rely on luck.
Captha: damnum. My sentiments exactly!
Admin
Or dies? Unlike the COBOL they manage, the sorcerers will eventually die!
Admin
Teach the kid (in the morning).
Admin
I'd've just gone to the operator (remember those?) and asked to have the job killed from the console. Easy-peasy.
By the way, I find it difficult to believe that an S106 would be all that difficult to find -- it just means that a program in the library is unreadable, probably because of a compilation or linkage editor error. There are several subcodes but all of them are similarly obvious. S0Cxs were generally more problematic. Trashing General Register 13 or the return register vector (I forget the IBMese for that) was the usual culprit.
Admin
my condolences to you ;)
Admin
Admin
Aaaaaahhhhhh. I knew what ABEND was before reading this ... and TSO. I must have accidentally become a student of the dark arts of the mainframe.
Admin
NERD ALERT!!!!!!!!!
Admin
ALU WTFUSR RESUME ALU WTFUSR PASS(omgwtf) NOEXPIRE
Oh no. 8 months since I last touched one of those big irons and I still remember the commands.
Addendum (2008-09-03 15:33): By the way, for those who haven't enjoyed the 3270 terminal experience, in this one it does matter where you type your commands. So raging alerts will make it impossible to execute a command.
By the way, one popular command on ISPF to avoid session timeout was what we dubbed the "dipping duck" command:
BOTTOM&30
which sends the command "BOTTOM" every 30 seconds, effectively working as if I had a "dipping duck" pressing Ctrl every 30 seconds.
Admin
Admin
Admin
I suspect the correct answer is "IPL" ... Initial Program Load ... which is the fancy mainframe name for the equivalent of ctrl-alt-del.
NOT something you want to have happen at random times due to noobs ... though I've even seasoned Sorcerers can do things like this accidentally (one even admitted it to me).
...and I've done it too. I was Sysadmin on an HP/3000 MPE (now HPE) system and typo'd a device type. Many hours of bit work later, I had seriously learned a lesson about ENSURING that I had a usable/bootable backup of the accounting structure before changing device configuration.
See, we'd just switched from the HP/3000 Series III to the Series 40. The Customer Engineers had done a system boot tape all right, but there was this tiny gotcha that if you don't back up at least one file on that tape (and they didn't) then the user accounting structure is not on it.
So I had tapes with the user accounting structure that would only boot on the Series III (which was out the door) -- and a Series 40 boot tape that had no accounting structure. I spent the next 15 hours or so bit-pushing to build something that would read the accounting structure off of the Series III boot tape.
... and that O/S is about as fool-proof as you can get.
Admin
such WTFery
Because the comments continually go down hill. Because people who have never had the pleasure of being awakened to a system alert that requires input at 3AM when a cleaning crew unplugged equipment don't believe it could happen. Because the same people think others should hand all of their knowledge out so that they don't have to learn from experience. Because I don't even care what I think.
Admin
I remember submitting COBOL jobs to Chicago in class via JCL and having to wait 3 hours to find out you had a syntax error in line 1398. Good times. NOT.
Admin
All those years slaving over an IBM Model 028 and 029 (bonus nerd points for knowing what one is without looking it up) and 3277 terminal have to count for something.
Not very much, mind you, but something. . .
Admin
Why is now that all I can think of is..
Hey Mickey, you're so fine. You're so fine you blow my mind. Hey Mickey! <clap,clap> Hey Mickey!
Admin
I know the 029 well, and have used the 026 when the 029 wasn't available.
The 082 and its newer cousin the 083 were designed to bisect and fanfold cards lengthwise.
And always remember: "Face down, 9 edge first!"
Admin
I see MATCHLIM not MAXLIM, so spell was cast.
CAPTCHA: nulla
Admin
, END
Admin
I can't believe some of you claim to work in IT and don't know what an abend is. What is this world coming to? HTML experience does not a programmer make.
And overnight phone calls for failed jobs are not uncommon, nor are they a rite of passage. They're part of the job. I was just pissed this week when I received a 5:30 am wake up call on a holiday for DEV one night, and the next, I get no call for a 12:30 am job fail due to a database server deciding to reboot itself. Op center just replied to the automated alert with "job abended.". No shit. I can ead your email, but not the one you replied-all to. Nevermind the alert contains the runbool entry that explicitly said to call me.
Admin
Uh - you're calling Nerd Alert in the daily WTF? You mean there's someone reading this who isn't a nerd?
Admin
Lot of fairly standard non-mainframe programmer type responses to this one, predictably. First, an Abend S106 is trivial to track and fix. Certainly doesn't need a SLIP trap. Second, there's no need to go into the machine room to "the terminal" to enter a SLIP trap. Third, as soon as the SYS1.DUMPxx datasets (files) fill, it stops taking dumps - nowhere to put them. Fourth, anyone who has ever issued any Unix command has no place criticizing z/OS command formats. Fifth, even if you are dumb enough to use the operator console to issue a SLIP, 3270 screens and emulators are not like Unix TTY crap. Messages issued by the system do not clear what you have typed in to the command area of the screen.
And we haven't even got into the supposed syntax of the SLIP command here...
Off topic, I heard a neat description of C the other month: "C and its derivatives are the world's first write-only programming languages, because nobody can read them".
Admin
SLIP is relatively modern command. The ancient incantations are done with 1 letter commands: C, D, E, F, H, K, M, P, R, S, T, U, V, Z. It's been a long, long, time since I worked at a console, but I think those are the cancel, display, reset, modify, hold, control, mount, stop, reply, start, set, unload, vary, and halt commands. I've probably forgotten 2.
I could look them up, but what's the fun of that?
And, uh..., I know what dozens of system abend codes mean. You would too, if you worked on MVS for 25<< a long damn time.
btw, I also know a couple dozen eunuchs commands, and can even use vi without having to restart every time.
Admin
The mainframe programmer strikes back? COBOL predates C, so C certainly can't be the "world's first." I've seen some COBOL, and though I'm not trained to read it, it's a mess. It takes much more code to accomplish the same tasks as it does in C, and severely handicaps the readability of the code.
There's nothing inherently wrong with C, and one could argue that "it's derivatives" comprise the bulk of modern languages today (C, C++, Java, C#). Of those, I would say that C itself does tend to be the least readable, but it's not the worse language in terms of readability. Perl gets that award.
Admin
Admin
BTW, shame on me for forgetting the Model 026 keypunch. I have no idea what an 028 might be -- I never saw one and must have made it up.
Admin
I am here, at the office, reading this story about ancient mainframes; and I read these comments, about how bad things were a far time ago...
Then, I stand up, look around, and see one or two hundred of my coworkers (*), not-so-furiously banging their keyboards, in front of their screens full of green text over a black background; they talk about PL/I, JCL, IMS, ABENDs, ...
(*) No kidding, there are about four hundred people in this single office, six hundred total in the building.
Admin
Marvellous. PIC X(20), 88-levels, and the endless full-stops. I remember the bad old days. I actually wrote a system to replace an IBM punch-card machine...in COBOL. Wonder if it's still running. Perhaps it's still compiling...
Admin
25-to-life? That's harsh.
Admin
Long long ago, when starting my first real job, I was introduced to the most ancient computer I had ever seen (core memory, punched-tape, etc). In fact I'm fairly sure that Babbage copied bits of the design in his difference engines.
It was big, hot and noisy, and needed frequent rebooting, hence I was told the proper sequence of actions to perform a clean restart.
"Press this, flip this then this then this, then press and hold this switch until the lights start flashing and you're done." said my new co-worker.
"Seems simple en..." I began.
"And whatever you do, do not flip the switches in the wrong order!" She added.
"Er, why? what happens?"
"Dunno. I've never made that mistake!"
"So how do we know not to do it?" I asked.
She looked at me pityingly, "That's what I was told when I started here."
Sure enough, the day came when 'Old Faithful' needed another restart, and I was put to the ultimate test. Could I handle the pressure of pressing five buttons and switches in the right order? Would I crack under the strain of a front-line outage? Was I up to the physical and mental demands of the job?
Walking up to the 'beast' I looked at the switches I was supposed to press. The first was a halt/reset switch, the middle three switches toggled bits in one of the machine's registers (set by a dial to the right, which had obviously never been changed since the damn thing was first assembled), and a proceed button that initiated the boot. It was obvious within the first few seconds that it mattered not one whit which order the middle switches were tripped in, regardless of stern warnings to the contrary.
By way of a practical demonstration to myself, I stopped the machine, toggled a few bits at random a dozen times to the tune of the 1812 overture, toggled bits until just the three flags required were lit and pressed the start button. It worked perfectly.
In nearly ten years there, the only other person I saw not reboot the machine with exactly the sequence I was told was the hardware engineer who occasionally came to fix it.
So, yes, sometimes the mighty sorcerers of old knew the real secrets of magic. And sometimes it's just a bunch of mumbo-jumbo hoodoo.
Admin
If you're going to quote someone's words, why not copy and paste the text? Then you wouldn't make a fool of yourself by changing his correct "its" to your illiterate "it's".
Admin
Admin
What are you talking about? So people either work on mainframes or they only have "HTML experience"? Anyone who doesn't know what an arbitrary error code on an arbitrarily chosen system means is relegated to HTML markup duties because they are just toooo stupid for anything else?
Get over yourself pops. You are not special. You are not important. That's why you're the nerd who knows all about error codes, because other people are too busy worrying about shit that actually matters. You and your knowledge of random error codes aren't the slightest bit impressive, and nobody here gazes in awe at how old school and elite you think you are.
What the hell do you talk about at parties? Do you share all the error codes you remember with the women there? Are they impressed?
My condolences. You must have a dreadful sex life.
Admin
Well, if the command trapped Everything, the output should have been easy enough to read through:
42
(Now understanding all the implications of what this might mean, that's an entirely different thing, of course...)
Admin
What's a sex life?
Admin
Admin
S106s are easy. The reason code, which describes the type of error in detail, is in register 15.
Say, f'instance S106, look up content of register 15, find the value 0C and you know that you ran out of memory space to load the module. Try increasing REGION and rerun the job. Common knowledge.
Damn, I'm scaring myself here. I actually KNEW that.... Why is it that I can remember this but can't for the life of me remember what I was supposed to pick up from the grocers' on the way home? Getting old is hell.
Bo
Admin
Admin
Ummm...Dave? Dave? Your doctor just called. He really thinks you should start taking your medications again. I mean, he really insists on it. I think you should listen. We certainly don't want a repeat of last time, when the men in white jackets came for you, do we?
Admin
Hah! Yeah right! A sorcerer is going to tell someone what he did to fix the problem? Pssssh! They keep those cards up against their chest. Glued to their chest even. That way they can stay the martyr... the sole saver of souls as well.