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Friday Fine-Tune: Tape to Disk, Posix time fix

C1539 tape driveEditor's Note: Monday is the Memorial Day holiday here in the Newswire's office. We'll be back with a new article on May 31. With every day that passes, HP's original hardware gets older and more likely to fail. Virtualization of hardware brings newer hardware into service with 3000s and helps with this problem, a risk that's greatest on the 3000's moving components. Especially tape drives like the C1539 above; even HP's discs are less likely to fail. Enjoy this advice on how to put stored data from tape into a store-to-disk file, as well as keeping dates accurate in MPE/iX's Posix name space.

I have some information on a tape. How do I create a store to disc file with it?

There are a few solutions. The first and easiest is to simply restore the info to a system (RESTORE *T;/;SHOW;CREATE;ACCOUNT=WORKSTOR) where WORKSTOR is an account you create to pull the data in.  Then a simple FILE D=REGSFILE;DEV=DISC and STORE /WORKSTOR/;*D;whatever else should create the disc store.

The second is to use FCOPY. The STORE format is FILE TAPEIN;DEV=TAPE;REC=8192,,U,BINARY.

John Pitman adds, "If you mean copy it off tape to disk store file, I’m not sure if that can be done. In my experience with tapes, there is a file mark between files, and EOT is signified by multiple file marks in a row. But it may be possible. If you do a file equate and FCOPY as shown below, you should be able to look at the raw data, and it should show separate files, after a file list at the front.

FILE TX;DEV=TAPE;REC=32767
FCOPY
FROM=*TX;TO=;CHAR;FILES=ALL

Here is our current store command, and the message it provokes. MAXTAPEBUF speeds it up somewhat

STORE  !INSTOREX.NEW.STOCK2K;*DDS777;
FILES=100000;DIRECTORY;MAXTAPEBUF

Why is the date/time in the Posix shell way off from the time on MPE, and what can be done to fix it? It’s over three weeks off.

Homesteading Editor Gilles Schipper replies:

First, check to ensure your timezone offset is correct and there are no pending time clock changes.

:showclock

SYSTEM TIME: TUE, OCT 19, 2010,  5:46:38 PM
CURRENT TIME CORRECTION: 0 SECONDS
TIME ZONE:  4 HOURS  0 MINUTES WESTERN HEMISPHERE

If the incorrext timezone and/or time correction is non-zero, you can fix both with the :SETCLOCK command.

Next, ensure that the TZ variable is appropriately set. This can be done with a system logon UDC that executes the following:

comment the following is for Eastern Time
SETVAR TZ "EST5EDT"
comment use the following for california
comment SETVAR TZ "PST8PDT"

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