Disclaimer : All that follows may be wrong and is only food for thought.

Depending on your setup, you might be able to get your "backup cleanup" job logged on.

How about increasing the Jobfence at backup time instead of lowering  the Job Limit ?
I believe a Jobfence of 8 or more won't let any default Jobs or Sessions log on and should be the same as a Limit of say 1,1. You can then have a higher INPRI specified for the cleanup Job which would allow it to log on.

Oooorrrr, how about converting your cleanup job to a command file and "time" it's execution by means of the PAUSE command ? 

Come to think of it you could specify that both jobs start at the same time (i.e. the backup job introduces the cleanup job before doing anything else). The cleanup job could then PAUSE for 4,5 hours before doing it's stuff or it could be continually checking the time and the existence of the backup job (there is a way to build a loop construct in a command file isn't there?). 

Happy Easter to those that haven't celebrated it yet. Strange why the dates should differ don't you think ? :)

Costas Anastassiades,
Athens-Greece




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From:   Phil Rupp, FNDP[SMTP:[log in to unmask]]
Sent:   ÐáñáóêåõÞ, 17 Áðñéëßïõ 1998 1:30 ðì
To:     [log in to unmask]
Subject:        Backup Blues

Well Kevin Newman found his answer for his nightly backup blues...
but I still have mine.  We do the same lights out nightly backup of
the HP3000 to DDS Dat at 1:30am each morning and everything works
great until the tape drive has problems and then the system is hung
in the backup job stream until someone comes in the next morning to
find the users crying about not being able to login.  It happened
again last night for the third time this month!

We use HP Store command to do the backup so the files are locked.  I
thought I'd stream a backup checkup job at 5:00am to see if the
backup job was still running (using Vesoft MPEX, the backup should be
done by then or else something is wrong) and if so, abort the backup
job and stream the system restart job stream to set the limits up and
allow everyone back on the system.  Last night I got the test of that
process but the 5am job couldn't run because (you guessed it) the
files were still locked by the backup.

Does anyone have a way to have the backup job, using Store, abort
itself if 5am rolls around and it is still running?  Or some other
solution?  I also put a call into HP Pics today and they are
researching for a solution, so let's see if you can find one first?

Thanks in advance!!!
-- Phil Rupp, IS Manager
   City of Santa Cruz