Reading Ultrix setld distribution tapes on VMS

[Paul Puglia]

Hmm.. If it's blocked like a tar file and its got the same number of
records as a tar file there must be tar files on them thar setld tapes.
But seriously folks, if a setld tape is made up of a number of tar files
then you can use the VMS convert with the enclosed fdl file to read these
files off of the setld tape.
-------------------cut here and put in a file with .fdl extension-------     
SYSTEM
        SOURCE                  VAX/VMS
     
FILE
        ALLOCATION              13
        BEST_TRY_CONTIGUOUS     no
        CLUSTER_SIZE            1
        CONTIGUOUS              no
        EXTENSION               0
        GLOBAL_BUFFER_COUNT     0
        ORGANIZATION            sequential
        OWNER                   [puglia]
        PROTECTION              (system:RWED, owner:RWED, group:RE, world:RE)
     
RECORD
        BLOCK_SPAN              yes
        CARRIAGE_CONTROL        none
        FORMAT                  fixed
        SIZE                    10240
     
_____________________________________________________________________________     

To actually read the tape, the command would be
$convert/pad/fdl=filename.fdl <tape device> filename.tar

and you would repeat this for the number of tar files on the setld tape.
If you just want to make copies of the tape just reverse the process
you used to read the files onto disk.  I used this command to copy tar tapes all
the time. It should even allow you to move stuff from a tk50 to nine-track.

If you wanted to move this files over to and ultrix machine, you should
use "dcp -i" (I believe the original poster said he had decnet) rather
then ftp, because some vms implementation of binary mode ftp also
take the ^@^B that separate records. These extra characters will
cause problems with the tar checksums. Once you have all the 
files on the ultrix side you can then you can cat the
pieces them all together to make a setld diskfile which you 
should be able to use setld on.

Paul Puglia
Dept of Civil Engineering
Columbia University