[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
>
>> 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
update -I talked to Mark off-list and he suggested I try setting up my 
ethernet port, but that isn't practical with the way I have my home laid 
out ( and can't change as I don't live alone).

So instead, I've played with trying to run a bridge over my wireless 
(which didn't work) and creating a vde network interface. I've installed 
libpcap-dev, the bridge utils, and the recommended vde packages.

I cut and pasted vde commands from the 0readme_ethernet.txt file and 
this is the result I get:

sim> attach xq vde:/tmp/switch1
Non-existent device

So that's where I've gotten so far.


-Michael