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Race Road - Cincinnati, Ohio 45211 - (513) 922-0509 - Fax (513)
347-2834
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the company bringing you quality HP hardware and software support
In many areas,
Spring and Summer mean severe storms and frequent power outages.
While HP3000 Computers and peripherals are among the most rugged
around, nothing is a match for a good jolt of lightning. With that
in mind I would urge you to take this opportunity to review your
backup and recovery procedures. As things change such as adding
more disk space or upgrading software packages, many times the necessary
steps for recovery may change as well.
Something else to keep in mind: A power outage that lasts for an
extended period of time can be extremely rough on a computer when
the power does return. When an entire room/building/city block demands
electricity all at once the quality of the power is usually poor.
You may want to consider pulling the plug on your HP3000 (not easy
for the 3 phase models such as the Series 70 or Series 950/960)
and external disks. If you run off the end of the HP3000' s battery
you will be forced to reboot anyway. Doing this will give you the
chance to bring the system back up under controlled circumstances.
It is a good idea to have a documented procedure on how turn on/off
all of the equipment in the computer room and the proper sequence
to power everything back on. First turn on all external disk drives
one at a time and let them spin up and complete power on self test.
Next, make sure the console is ready. Next you can turn on modems
and printers. Then you can power on the CPU. Keep a careful eye
on the bootup process to be sure that all disk drives get mounted
and you get a message "DCC startup OK" on MPE/iX systems.
You may want to keep a check list for what to do to validate the
system. Things such as doing a :DSTAT ALL command to make sure all
disk drives are mounted, test modems which are easy targets for
storm damage, application checks that need to be addressed such
as KSAM file recovery.