🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <2rfr8p$41t@netnews.upenn.edu> kirsten@ssc.sas.upenn.edu (Kirsten Starcher) writes:
>We have a large number of IBM mainframe 9-track tapes, both labelled
>and unlabelled, that we would like to transcribe to our RS/6000s.  Does
>anyone know of a script or program that we could use to make a dumb
>copy of the tapes to online storage? (Preserving record length and
>block size.)
>
>Failing that, would it be feasible to write something that looks at each
>block, determines its length, and writes the block length to disk along
>with the block itself?  What would be the best approach to this?
>
>Kirsten Starcher
>kirsten@ssc.sas.upenn.edu           kirsten@morgan.ucs.mun.ca

I am not following you here - "transcribe" to what?  The basic
"otherscsi" magnetic tape driver on AIX 3.2.5 should have no trouble
reading from a generic SCSI 9-track tape drive.  There is software
around that does labeled tapes.  The AT&T Unix Toolchest has something,
for example.  If you have a lot of tapes, you probably don't want to
rewrite them all.  The EBCDIC conversion can be done on the fly.  Or
maybe you want to convert everything into tar format?

Regards,

Lester

--
A. Lester Buck
Cornell Theory Center
lbuck@tc.cornell.edu