[Simh] VAX Tape Emulation?

[Zane Healy]

Yes, I’m trying to preserve the data on hard drive from future hardware failures.

I started out looking to backup to virtual tape.  I’m still looking to do that, but I’m now mainly looking to move the majority of the data off of the Physical Alpha, and to a Virtual VAX.  I hadn’t realized how big of virtual disks could be attached, so didn’t consider that a practical option.

Last night I installed Linux on an old Core i5 system I’d picked up recently to run SIMH on.  Today I’ll try to get a new VAX system added to my cluster.  Unlike my other two virtual VAXen, this one is on a host with a 500GB drive (tiny by todays standards, but huge compared to the Alpha, or  where the other two virtual VAXen are running).

Zane




> On Jan 26, 2018, at 1:27 AM, Johnny Billquist <bqt at softjar.se> wrote:
> 
> Then I must have misunderstood the usecase. I thought you were looking at preserving a bunch of tapes from a future failure of the hardware.
> 
> Are you then looking at ways to perform backups of a physical system to virtual tape?
> 
> I would probably give the virtual machine a really big disk and run backup to that remote disk and not try to play with remote tapes.
> 
> Johnny 
> 
> 
> Zane Healy <healyzh at avanthar.com> skrev: (26 januari 2018 02:54:20 CET)
> If it was applicable to the situation, then VMSTPC would work great.  It’s already installed on my Alpha, and I’m pretty sure there is a VAX binary for it in the VAX directory on there.  I also have it installed on my RSX-11M+.  It’s definitely a great tool.  Just not for this. :-)
> 
> Zane
> 
> 
>  On Jan 25, 2018, at 2:54 PM, Armistead, Jason <Jason.Armistead at otis.com> wrote:
>  
>  Zane
>  
>  The program that Johnny is thinking of is VMSPTC
>  
>  http://www.digiater.nl/openvms/decus/vax86a/bnelson/vmstpc/vmstpc.c <http://www.digiater.nl/openvms/decus/vax86a/bnelson/vmstpc/vmstpc.c>
>  
>  Note sure if this is the latest, but it came up in the first set of Google search results for "VMSTPC"
>  
>  Good luck
>  Jason
>  
>  
>  -----Original Message-----
>  From: Simh [mailto:simh-bounces at trailing-edge.com] On Behalf Of Johnny Billquist
>  Sent: Thursday, 25 January 2018 5:48 PM
>  To: Zane Healy; Tim Shoppa
>  Cc: simh at trailing-edge.com
>  Subject: Re: [Simh] VAX Tape Emulation?
>  
>  Zane - unless I remember wrong, there is a tool from DECUS to copy tapes to a file image, and then get that back to a tape again. The RSX version is called TPC, and I'm pretty sure it also exists for VMS.
>  
>  Using that, pull your physical tapes into files, copy the files over to the simulated machines, and write them back out to simulated tapes there.
>  
>    Johnny
> 
> Simh mailing list
> Simh at trailing-edge.com
> http://mailman.trailing-edge.com/mailman/listinfo/simh <http://mailman.trailing-edge.com/mailman/listinfo/simh>
> -- 
> Skickat från min Android-enhet med K-9 Mail. Ursäkta min fåordighet.

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.trailing-edge.com/pipermail/simh/attachments/20180126/1f9ff429/attachment.html>