> On Jan 25, 2018, at 6:57 AM, Clem Cole <cl...@ccc.com> wrote: > > > > On Wed, Jan 24, 2018 at 5:25 PM, Zane Healy <heal...@avanthar.com > <mailto:heal...@avanthar.com>> wrote: > > I’d like to backup to a simulated tape drive on the one emulated VAX. The > largest drive on my Alpha is 50GB. I’d prefer not to have to span tapes. :-) > Another thought... what are you running the emulator on? Is it a > UNIX/Linux flavor of some type? I ask because there might be another > solution that could work a little better in practice, although you'll need to > pull together some pieces. The problem is the bits in my brain WRT to > VMS are 20+ years old and I've forgotten the details so you'll have to do > some homework. > > At one point, I remember that some VMS folks in ZK3 (CJ Coppersmith seems to > stick in my head by I do not remember) were messing we putting a the UCB > sockets library into VMS and were somebody ported the Berkeley rcmd(3) suite > on VMS from Tru64. I'm not sure if how much of that library or which > commands ever saw the light of day in a production version of VMS. But the > idea (then) was that a VMS system could use remote services (such as a tape) > via a socket. The UNIX command is called rmt(8) (and of course mt(8) and > IIRC rmt(8) was originally based on the rcmd(3) calls from rsh/rcp et al. > > So assuming VMS supports same, using mt(8)/rmt(8) is trival on a UNIX side. > But more importantly for you is that on the UNIX side the remote 'device' > can be a UNIX file as easily as a physical tape if the 'source' side knows > about using a socket as the output 'device.'. I've used this trick to back > up some older systems to modern devices these days (my Masscomp box for > instance). The "tape files" are stored on my NAS which has redundant > physical disks etc... In fact, I've even recompiled mt/rmt for my Mac at > one point and I have it working on *BSD with modern tapes (just needed to > grab the mtio.h file from BSD).
Interesting… I wonder if this is an option in the latest versions of OpenVMS. I was already researching OpenSource VTL options. The problem being a distinct lack of support for OpenVMS in any OpenSource backup software that I could find. Zane
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