the good old days of mainframe computers

[Bill (Smithville NJ)]

(09-22-2021 02:09 AM)Don Shepherd Wrote:  Rumor had it that there was a systems guy who crashed the computer on purpose

I remember our first Sun Unix server at work. We had an outside firm that maintained it. They had set up a back-up system (to tape at that time) that I couldn't understand how it worked or even verify that it actually worked.

So one day I informed them that next week i planed to deliberately hard crash the system and then we would verify that they could do a complete restore from their crazy back-up system. They were horrified and finally admitted that their system did not do a full system backup.

A co-worker and I then proceeded to spend a very long weekend reading the Unix manuals and learning the correct way to do a full system backup. We then replaced their backup with the correct backup and fired them.

And yes - I did do a hard crash of the Unix System and then used the the backup to restore it. Worked perfectly.


One other side note. When I was in college in the early Seventies, there was an unofficial "Crash Club". To become a member, you had to crash the large student CDC computer to the point that it had to be powered off and then brought back on-line. I was a proud member of the Crash Club.

The interesting thing was that you really didn't get into bad trouble for doing this. In my case, I ended up doing an "Independent Study Course" with a professor where I studied why my method crashed it and how the system could be fixed so that way would not work in the future. I even got course credit towards my degree.


73
Bill WD9EQD
Smithville, NJ