Beware the Undead IBM System: When End of Life Is Just the Beginning

It began, as all good horror stories do, with a whisper...

“Your system’s at End of Life,” the TPM said.

“But don’t worry, we can keep it alive. MWA HA HA HA!”

And so, we believed them.
(The sinister laugh at the end of that sentence probably should’ve been a giveaway).

Our once-proud IBM system was “resurrected” under third-party care, alive, but not quite what it once was.
Like a pet from Pet Sematary, it came back… different.

At first, all seemed well. The lights blinked. The fans hummed. Users carried on as if nothing had changed.
Then one fateful night, we tried to apply an update…

Fix Central was closed off to the Frankenstein’s monster kept alive by parts dug up from who knows where.

Microcode was protected from the unnatural abomination.

OS updates were nowhere to be found - no access for the living dead!

That’s when we realised the terrible truth:
We had believed the lie of “End of Life”… and in doing so, we’d created a monster....when all we needed to do was accept the Change of Service Level.

Our TPM could service the hardware, yes, but IBM’s updates, patches, machine code and firmware were beyond their reach.
We were trapped in a living nightmare, haunted by the words “Access Denied.”

No updates.
No fixes.
No peace of mind.

Each night the team lay awake, listening to the hum of undead servers and the whisper of “Access Denied…” echoing through the data centre. They knew the outage was coming they just didn’t know when.

We needed holy water.
We needed garlic.
We needed someone brave enough to enter the server room at midnight.

We needed Baby 👻oo to banish the demons, lift the curse, and guide us back into the light of IBM Support.

And the final twist?
The exorcism cost less than we were paying the TPM!

So this Halloween, check your maintenance coverage.
Make sure your systems are truly alive and not the living dead!

Because in IT, the real horror isn’t ghosts, vampires, or monsters…
It’s seeing this message when you need it most:

💀 “Access to updates… denied.”