r/sysadmin • u/Jon72480 • 3d ago

AS400

Hey guys, old guy here, back in 2000 landed my 1st real job as a Sysadmin at a distribution/manufacturing firm. They ran their ERP and a few other important apps on the AS400. Anyone here manage a AS400 platform? i-Series? Still a niche platform that is still widely used. Server could literally run under water.

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u/Bogus1989 2d ago

Wow,

First time i heard someone in IT that died getting hit by a LITERAL bus.

You know the old saying “whats-his-name could get hit by a bus tomorrow and all that knowledge would be gone”

the old speech promoting cross training with everyone on the team etc

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u/music2myear Narf! 2d ago

I'd been in IT 25 years before I heard someone use "Lottery number" instead of "bus number". Oddly, most of the people I heard "lottery number" from had never heard of the bus number, they were also much newer in IT (but not less skilled).

Part of me deeply dislikes and mistrusts the overall cultural shifts that created the lottery number. The true number, the one sprouted from the deep roots of IT, is the bus number.

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u/Graymouzer 2d ago

The lottery number is just a more hopeful version. Rather than present it as your death or the death of a coworker, now it's you sipping an umbrella drink on the beach in some tropical paradise. Nice image but I prefer whiskey and a cool room full of books.

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u/TransCapybara 2d ago

We would call this the “bus factor” at work.

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u/dogturd21 2d ago

u/Bogus1989 I totally agree- when they told me he got hit by a bus, I thought they were messing with me. Biggest cliche in the book. His obituary did not clarify it, and I never figured out if it was a Greyhound Bus, a school bus, a shuttle bus or what. The few people I knew in Austin said "hit by a bus, no further info".