RE: Tape Exchange between AS/400 and NCR

[Don Kuenz <kuenzdc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

If you use a reel tape it should work because you can leave off the standard
IBM label.

But, if you use a Quarter Inch Cartridge (QIC) drive, you're out of luck,
because AFAIK the AS400 *inisists* upon an IBM standard label on all tape
cartridges. When you attempt to read a standard label using Linux, Solaris,
or AIX, they all return an End Of Tape (EOT) condition just as soon as they 
read the label. It appears that the standard label uses a block size 
other than 512 bytes, while the unices expect 512 byte block sizes. This 
causes the premature EOT. It matters little what options you include with tar, 
cpio, dd, etc. It appears that the only way around this is to create a 
device driver that reads AS400 cartridges. You'll encounter literature, 
and sometimes even source code, on the Internet that suggests a way to 
exchange standard label tapes between a AS400 and a VMS, but these methods
seem to assume that you use a reel tape. 

On slight ray of hope is that you *can* use the AS400 DUMP command to 
successfully read non-standard label, unix tapes. Unfortunately, this 
command wants to print whatever it finds on tape, it lacks an option to 
save data to a file. But, given this very slight success, there may be a
way to use the documentation mentioned in the previous paragragh and create
a standard label tape on your NCR.

After several frustrating months trying to crack this problem I finally
threw in the towel and instead used RUMBA to copy QIC tape files from/to
a PC. At that point I used ftp, samba, etc. to copy them from/to unix.

-Don Kuenz
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