re : DVD-RAM Drive in new machine

Hi Vern,

What you're suggesting would possibly work, ie, the PC should have no
problem copying from one drive mapped to QOPT to whatever drive the CD
burner uses. The only thing I'm not sure about is the format. I do know the
DVD-RAM format is different to normal CDs/DVDs, infact you can see that
just by looking at the surface of the disk. I guess it depends on whether
the PC can convert from one format to the other?

As for the DVD-RAM v. tape format, the reason we got the DVD-RAM was to
replace a 3480. We have one company that we were sending extracts to, and
they only had an old 3480. We had a program that used CPYTOTAP and we'd
send them the media. We are, however, in the process of upgrading to an
825, and being completely PCI it won't run the old 3480 (and we convinced
the customer to shell out the couple of hundred dollars for the DVD-RAM
reader). We tried various tests, and found that using FTP to the loopback
address and doing a put in ASCII mode through /QOPT (to the DVD_RAM) ended
up with exactly the same format as the CPYTOTAP command. These were DB2
files as well, not stuff from the IFS. (I guess you could probably do the
same thing with CPYTOSTMF, but I couldn't be bothered playing with
CCSID's).

Hope that helps....

Adam Driver
Technical Consultant
Kaz Technology Services
Level 7
66 Wentworth Ave
Sydney NSW 2010
Australia
Phone: +61 2 9844 0386
Fax: +61 2 9844 0333

A division of Kaz Group Limited - visit our website at www.kaz.com.au

date: Mon, 18 Aug 2003 21:45:20 -0500
from: Vern Hamberg <vhamberg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
subject: re : DVD-RAM Drive in new machine

Thanks, Adam

What if you read the DVD on the iSeries, mapping a network drive to the
QOPT directory for it? Then you could take those files to the PC and
further burn them to a CD, size allowing, right?

I'm most curious (we don't have this kind of unit yet) whether these files
on the DVD are the same as files on a tape with TWERP turned off (tape
write error protection), as is done when premastering for CDs. If so, then
premastering is no longer necessary. The test would be to save installation

objects (libraries, etc., and the QINSTAPP program) to the DVD, copy them
to the PC, and burn them to CD. Then see whether LODRUN works off that CD,
which should be readable in the DVD-RAM on the iSeries, IIRC.

Regards

Vern