Got this from an AS/400, iSeries and System i systems integrator:

That’s right, it’s a System i 570 (notice TYPE is 9406-570), but the faceplate clearly and proudly says “System p5.” Is this the equivalent of a marketing Freudian slip from the factory? Most likely it’s just an honest mistake, but it’s another twist in the dagger of System i folks who feel that IBM isn’t doing a good enough job promoting the platform.

Search400.com member Gary shares his blunder:  

Back in the early days of my IT career our small firm of four people did not have its own hardware, so we did all of our work at our client sites. At one point, we needed to reload all of our software on a customer’s System/36.  Knowing that we had faithfully backed up all of our software on a regular basis, we deleted all of our program libraries and tried to restore from the backup diskettes. We discovered that the diskettes did not contain any of our libraries, only the system library. We tried the previous set of backups. Same results. What we soon discovered was that the command we had been using “BACKUP xxxxxxxx” didn’t take any parameters and was used just to back up the system library. We finally found a set of backups from 6 months prior that contained our libraries. What saved us was the fact that since we didn’t have our own hardware, we always kept a current printed version of the compile listings. We recompiled all of the programs from the backup, printed the compile listings and then four people spent a full week comparing the two compiles for each program by laying them on top of each other at a window and bringing the source current. Needless to say, we never made that mistake again.  

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Search400.com member David shares his blunder:

Years ago, in my first AS/400 job, the company I worked for had only one box to use for both production and development. (I cringe when I think about that, now.)  When we were developing, we would just copy the production data into our personal libraries so that we could do our testing.

So, the pattern went:

- Copy production data to personal library (using CPYF)

- Run my program over the data in my personal library

- Inspect the results and make program changes accordingly

- Clear the file in my personal library (CLRPFM)

- Go back to the first step and start again

As you can probably already imagine, during one testing cycle, I accidentally cleared the PRODUCTION table instead of the copy in my library. When my index finger was a millimeter away from the Enter key, I realized what I was about to do. But, it was too late to stop.Within a couple minutes, the end-users were calling me, asking, “What happened to my pricing quotes?”I turned to my manager (who sat in a desk directly behind me), and I told him what just happened. He smiled, he chucked, and he showed me where the backup tapes were stored.We restored the table’s data from the previous night, but that day’s data was gone.I don’t think we ever told the users why one day’s worth of pricing quotes needed to be re-entered.

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Search400.com member “Bud” shares his blunder:  

While recently putting the latest CUME & Hiper Group on our model 810, I experienced a failure for some PTF’s to apply for iSeries Access.  So, I downloaded what were the missing concurrent PTFs from Fix Central and tried to apply them.  It didn’t work, and at that point I couldn’t figure out what was going on so contacted IBM Support — on Saturday.  The contact guy sorted out what was going on, had me re-apply one of them and bounce the box.  Now, understand that at the time I was doing this I was talking to him (as in not paying attention to what I was doing).  He told me if I had any more issues to call him back.  So, for 45 minutes I’m staring at the front panel and everything looks normal to me (Normal mode: running on B side) except for a blinking light to the immediate right of the start button. 

In my defense, I was handed the job of software administration two years ago and have never performed any manual functions on the box. Anyway, to figure what the blinking light meant, I hunted it down at the infocenter (no mean feat) and read that it meant the “system has power.”  Also, since I’m in a room with lots of little fans spinning in lots of little boxes, the noise level is, well its noisy in there!  I finally caved in and called the guy back.  He said, “Um, your system isn’t powered up.”  But I see an illuminated panel and there’s power to the box.  “Yeah, but that doesn’t mean it’s powered up, it just means there’s power to the box,” he added. I felt like such an idiot.  Then he added, “Don’t feel bad, you wouldn’t believe the number of calls we receive on this.”

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Search400.com member Frank shares his blunder:

“I was a newbie contract programmer at an electric company.  My
desk was in their computer room, which had a large glass window.  I could
look out at 30 or so customer service employees diligently working in their
cubicles.  The amount of data that they needed to save on their nightly
backups outgrew their tape drives unattended abilities.  They wanted me to
save half the data on Monday, Wednesday and Friday and the other half on
Tuesday and Thursday.  I was being especially careful, because I had to test
my CL program, which put their system in a restricted state.  After
completing the programming, I was able to relax a little.  The final piece
of the project was to put my CL into the Job Scheduler.  Afterwards, I
looked out the window and noticed one of the employees standing up from his
desk — then a second and a third.  That’s odd, everybody’s taking a break at
the same time?  Starting to feel a little panic, I looked down at my
terminal screen and it was exactly as I had last seen it.  Then it hit me,
I’m at the console!   I just put the system into a restricted state in the
middle of their workday!  I’ll never forget that the default date and time
on the scheduler is the current date and time.”

Do you have a blunder to share? 

 If you’re like me and enjoy hearing about other people’s goofs or funny screw-ups, check out our Blunders page. As much as we all enjoy hearing about our peer’s mishaps, we have to admit, we’ve all made mistakes at one time or another and had to answer for our actions. Why not share your blunder, it’s a great way to prevent others from making the same mistake.

Almost in time for the Ides of March, IBM is releasing the long-awaited ‘lite’ version of WDSC, version 7.0.  This new version is supposed to be able to run in a much smaller memory footprint.  That is good.  The bad news is that IBM appears to be trying to squueze a little more revenue from its customer base with regards to the (also) long-awaited replacements for CODE DESIGNER and CODE NAVIGATOR 

For a number of years now, a lot of WDSC fans, including myself, would ask George Farr or Phil Coulthard when these vital tools would finally be integrated into the WDSCi code base.  The answer was usually some variation of soon.  Turns out that soon may actually have been IBM-speak for never. The integrated WDSC replacements for these two tools are only included in the Advanced Edition of WDSC, at a cost of nearly $3,500 / developer.  If every reader who thinks their boss is going to cough up that much case per seat will send me a quarter, I just might get enough case to buy a small (tall) cup of Starbucks coffee!

Who else out there thinks IBM has blown it, considering they keep telling us to stop using PDM/SEU/SDA and get into the WDSC world?