3480 pictures

[Mike Ross]

This is a more recent z/Series machine; it may well be running Linux
on the Support Element rather than OS/2.

But Guy is 100% correct; all the support and configuration stuff there
is critical to preserve exactly as-is. Recreating it from backups or
reinstalling it from scratch is not for the faint-hearted. A lot of it
is very arcane stuff, for IBM service engineers only; don't forget,
there's stuff in there IBM charge big money for - enabling and
disabling CPUs and memory. You want more CPU in your mainframe? You
pay IBM $50k or whatever and they send an engineer round to turn it
on... ok it can be done remotely too these days but point taken;
there's a lot of stuff in there that's critical, undocumented,
specific to the individual machine, and never supposed to be touched
by anyone outside IBM...

Mike

On Fri, Oct 9, 2015 at 11:09 AM, jwsmobile <jws at jwsss.com> wrote:
>
>
> On 10/8/2015 2:09 PM, Guy Sotomayor wrote:
>>>
>>> On Oct 8, 2015, at 2:04 PM, Cindy Croxton <sales at elecplus.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>> There appears to be a Z system in the photos.  Image035.jpg is a photo
>>> showing the open system bay, and the HMC laptop.  It is beyond critical
>>> that that laptop be carefully preserved and handled, as that will be the
>>> difference between junk and possibly turning it on and running it again.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Thanks, Jim.  I have let them know to preserve the laptop, and asked for
>>> a
>>> price for the system.
>>>
>> It’s not only important to preserve the laptop(s) but to preserve them
>> *with*
>> the z/system.  It’s an integral part of the machine.  The z/system is a
>> boat
>> anchor without it.
>>
>> TTFN - Guy
>>
>>
>>
> Good point, Guy.  A backup may not be enough as well.  If by some miracle
> the microcode is available from the customer site in the form of floppies of
> CDrom that is critical too.
>
> Mike Ross may comment on this and maybe others, but I think it is possible
> to build back up an HMC for one of these systems given the microcode, more
> easily than it is with older systems which used PS2/30's.  But it is
> critical to have the microcode, which is most likely a copy of OS/2 with a
> bunch of extra files on it.
>
> The PS2/30's had a very narrow range of hardware that is increasingly not
> around in working form (disk drives) anymore, where the laptops have a
> better chance of working with the image backup place on a different unit.
>
> But one needs access to this laptop to make sure it is backed up (or system)
> before going very far.
> Thanks
> Jim
>



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