[Simh] A basic question; can I mount tar files as tape devices?

[Michael Huff]

On 03/12/2015 05:15 PM, Mark Pizzolato - Info Comm wrote:
> On Thursday, March 12, 2015 at 5:24 PM, Michael Huff wrote:
>> I have tried creating tar files and then mounting them as devices and/or
>> reading from them with tar but I haven't had any success. I've tried
>> googling and looking around, but I haven't figured out how to do this.
> Tar files are simply streams of bytes.  They are NOT simh tape files 
> with built in record sizes and tape marks.  There may be tools to 
> convert a tar file to a simh structured tape, but I personally don't 
> know of one.  It wouldn't be too hard to write a program to do that 
> though.  The simh tape structure is documented in section A.3 of 
> http://simh.trailing-edge.com/pdf/simh_doc.pdf
Thanks for the info. Unfortunately I don't know how to program, so I'll 
probably try to follow your advice about networking.


>> My host machine is Linux Mint/17/amd64 and I'm using the vax780
>> simulator with 4.3BSD, and I'm trying to work out how to get files and
>> and out of there (I haven't had any better luck with networking).
> If you use the latest simh code from 
> https://github.com/simh/simh/archive/master.zip and you happen to have 
> 2 network interfaces on your Linux Mint host machine you can easily 
> get networking working.  If have two NICs I can walk you through the 
> details.  Alternatively, bridged networking can be setup, but the 
> details are significantly more complicated...
>
> - Mark
I do have two interfaces; I have eth0 and wlan0 (wireless).  My computer 
is set to use wireless networking, so eth0 is unused and free.