The Stormy Season
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.