[Simh] Attach tar to tape device and access it from v7 in simh

[Will Senn]

Brilliant. Thanks for the reminder. It's all crystal clear to me now :).

Sent from my iPhone

> On Nov 7, 2017, at 5:02 PM, Johnny Billquist <bqt at softjar.se> wrote:
> 
> Repeat after me: tapes are not streams of bytes. See Clem's response for more detail. :-)
> 
>  Johnny
> 
>> On 2017-11-07 20:58, Will Senn wrote:
>> Hi,
>> I think I may have asked this a couple of years ago, but I am unable to find the email conversation, so I'll ask it again from a position of experience and greater but still lacking knowledge... here's the background - I am running a v7 instance in simh that I am quite pleased with. However, I saw somewhere where someone was running some additional software on their instance and of course, I just had to have it for my own. Unfortunately, it's not clear how they got the software, where it's from, or how they got it running. There are hints that the stuff came from early bsd. So... I thought I would try getting the bsd source on to my v7 instance to see if I could compile it and play around with it. There's a 1bsd.tar.gz in the tuhs archive. It being a tar file, I figured I could:
>> gunzip 1bsd.tar.gz
>> in simh:
>> att mt0 1bsd.tar
>> in v7, which defaults to mt1 for some reason, (not a configured device on my system and isn't created by make tm in /dev):
>> tar vxfb /dev/rmt0 1
>> nboot.ini-13> boot rp0
>> Invalid magtape record length, PC: 002400 (MOV 177776,R0)
>> or
>> tar xv0
>> nboot.ini-13> boot rp0
>> Invalid magtape record length, PC: 002400 (MOV 177776,R0)
>> I don't know why the nboot.ini-13> boot rp0 artifact is appearing (prolly some buffer flush when the sim aborts)... but of more concern is why I can't access the tar. I'm sure it is a gap in my understanding, so I'd appreciate some help.
>> Thanks,
>> Will
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> 
> 
> -- 
> Johnny Billquist                  || "I'm on a bus
>                                  ||  on a psychedelic trip
> email: bqt at softjar.se             ||  Reading murder books
> pdp is alive!                     ||  tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol
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