David Boyes wrote:
Then, if you are willing to buy hardware as David Boyes outlined, you can
perhaps do it that way. I have no knowledge about these products, and we have
not tested that approach, so I do not know whether or not it works. If
someone has tried it, I'd be (academically, I'll admit) interesting in knowing
The “faketape” support for the ZPDT and friends is basically the same
technology as the OMA/2, but done completely in software, so if you want to
give it a whirl, find someone with a ZPDT. AWSTAPE files (a volume is a
directory with files containing the same data as on physical carts and some
metadata) were invented for the OMA/2, which looks like a really long 3422
volume to the host. The flexCUB box is able to emulate all sorts of devices,
disk/tape/3270/etc. They’re really handy if you need to handle some obscure
volume format on an older CPU - we recently reanimated a 4341 using one for all
the I/O devices on that system.
We bought a physical OMA/2 long long ago and kept running with a bus/tag to
FICON converter. BusTech also made a similar box, but I don’t remember now
whether there was ever an ESCON version. The OMA/2 supports CD and DVD media,
albeit with a few manual hoops to select and mount the right “volume” on the
emulated device. It’s one of the major reasons I wish ZPDT supported an
emulated 3494 library controller device so I could finally retire that box.
Today, I’d probably just try to find a desktop SCSI 3590, attach it to a
stand-alone PC, and use the tape image utilities provided with Hercules to
create a 3590 from AWSTAPE files on the DVD. Then, apply service as normal (or
at least till IBM decides to remove the tape support code from SMP/E).
It’d be really slick if IBM reanimated the OMA/2 device with a native FICON
adapter, even if it was just for this purpose. The ability to emulate a range
of mainframe devices on commodity hardware has been really, really useful over
the years.
Ah, so that's what you meant. I hadn't inferred that from your earlier
post.
As the original builder of the ADCD systems (originally created to
support P390s), I do know about AWSTAPE support (which was originally
written for the P390s). However, we do not, and have no plans to,
deliver the DVD files in AWSTAPE format.
Were there hardware available to read the files we do supply on DVD so
they could be written to the z/OS UNIX file system, I would find that
interesting.
--
John Eells
IBM Poughkeepsie
ee...@us.ibm.com
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