What mistakes have you confessed (or not) to....

CICS Guy

CA/Ideal/Datacomm clean up of old user ids.

A small house-keeping exercise - they had downsized the Datacomm support to close to zero so I inherited it - The task was to eliminate the un-used and obsolete (occasionally the DOD goes on a 'path' that does not always make sense) IDs in the system.

I gathered all the UIDs and emailed the list to the RACF security people. I don't remember her name, but she diligently eliminated from that list all the mandatory IDs that were required for batch and online processing.

Upon receiving the reply I proceeded to create a batch job to delete the obsolete IDs on her returned list.

If I had only taken a couple of minutes to compare the sent list and the received list, this would not be posted here now...

It didn't take long to identify the problem, and the deletes were quickly reinstated, but the potential 'red' faces were showing up in two cubicles.

When the knowledge that you had to be careful while replying to an email with an updated attached list finally occurred to me, I have become more vigilant and even go to the extent to send myself the email first to insure that the returned attachment is the one I intended.

Truth be told, She in security got jumped on, but I immediately talked to her 'superior' and shifted the blame on myself, she (a civilian DOD employee), stayed employed and I (a contractor) did too.

Sometimes, confessing up to a potential error will get canned, but hiding behind the blame that might fall to someone less blameless is not a path I would choose.

expat · Posted: Tue Jun 15, 2010 11:36 am Post subject:

Having managed to get the COBOL program written and tested for the new report distribution system that I had been give nas a project, and happy with the results I finally managed to get it implemented just on time to allow me to go away for a weeks vacation.

Unfortunately I had moved the test JCL into production without removing the RETPD=0 from the DD for the archive tape.

Ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooops

Another good one - don't try to COMPAKT the volume with the JES checkpoint residing on it.

And of course, moving a PROCLIB isn't the best idea in hindsight.

enrico-sorichetti

and never compress sys1.linklib
( difficult not to let people know )

mistakes... we do not make no steenkin mistakes !