NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #19/NN_1992_19.iso/spool/comp/unix/admin/4871

Internet Message Format | 1992-09-03 | 3.2 KB

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From: [e-mail] (Benjamin Clardy)
Subject: Re: Any clues about IBM mainframe tape conversions?
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Date: Fri, 4 Sep 1992 02:26:33 GMT
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In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Kirk M. Anne) writes:
>We have been asked to decommission our IBM VM/CMS mainframe.  The committee
>that is working on this project has asked me to find out what other sites
>do with IBM mainframe tapes for UNIX systems.  I know that 'dd' will read
>the tapes, but many of our users have SAS tapes that were created on CMS.
>I would like to find some clues to the following questions:
>
>    What do you do when you get tapes from IBM sites?
Copy to Exabytes using dd.
>    What utilities do you use to convert tapes?
dd.  We also use a commercial utility called tconvert which is somewhat like
ditto in its ability to interactively look at a tape.
cmstape, which is available on the net will read and write CMS tapes.  I have
used this program a reasonable amount and it works fine.  The source must be
modified slightly so that underscore characters are correctly converted from
EBCDIC to ASCII.
>    How do you handle SAS tapes created on CMS?
cmstape will not be of any help with SAS datasets.  Due to differences in
architecture, the binary format for datasets is different.  This allows SAS
to take advantage of hardware-based numeric representation.  Although, it
is certainly possible, I know of no method of directly converting SAS
datasets from one architecture to another.  You must load it back up and
convert it to an export file, which is architecture independent.  The layout
for SAS Version 5.xx is availble from SAS in case you want to write your
own read program.  SAS has decided not to make available the layout for
SAS Version 6.xx, instead trying to sell its SAS Toolkit product which
allows one to write procedures that directly interface with SAS.  Of
course, Toolkit is only available for MVS, CMS, and ?, but it is not
available yet for Unix.
>    How do you handle multi-tape data sets?
Multi-volume tapes seem to work ok but I recently ran into a problem
with a set of multi-volume tapes where my machine was dropping a few
blocks but not saying anything about it.  This problem may be
unrelated to multi-volume (although the blocks that it drops are
suspiciously at the beginning or end of a tape), but if your
interested e-mail me back.  I should have the problem figured out
in a few days or so.
>
>I will post a summary of the clues that I receive.
>
>Thanks in advance,
>
>Kirk Anne                Internet: [e-mail]
>UNIX Consultant                Phone:    [phone]
>Taylor Hall 24                Fax:      [phone]
>University of Rochester
>Rochester, NY 14627

Benjamin
--
Benjamin Clardy                    [e-mail]