[Info-vax] Locally mount vms volumes in Linux

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2018-01-05 21:00:50 +0000, henry.seib at gmail.com said:

> Am Freitag, 25. Februar 2011 22:37:40 UTC+1 schrieb Michael Kraemer:
>> gregor.oelze schrieb:
>> 
>>> PS: The VMS system was running on a Microvax 3100.
>> 
>> So maybe it's easier to use an original Microvax again, or a VS3100 maybe?
> 
> Hallo Herr Kraemer,

Welcome to the Usenet newsgroup comp.os.vms!

This thread is from 2011, and some of the folks might not still be 
reading the newsgroup.

> gibt es schon eine Lösung für das Einbinden von VAX/FMS *.dsk Formaten 
> in Linux (Debian, Ubuntu 16.04 LTS [wir wechseln erst auf 18.04! also 
> ca. 2020]?
> Es fragt mailto:dk2vh at heise-media.eu, Connect e.V. #26168258

Es wird einfacher sein, OpenVMS zu verwenden.

There are tools that allow mounting OpenVMS disks on other platforms, 
and might be able to help with the OpenVMS-specific and 
application-specific metadata, but it'll be far easier to access the 
apps and the metadata and the rest from OpenVMS.  OpenVMS can be booted 
from emulators, and there are free licenses and downloads available for 
non-commercial use.  If this is a commercial app and the old VAX system 
is still around, those licenses can be migrated over to the emulation.  
That usage is generally permitted for cases when the original server is 
down, but check your particular software licenses and check with your 
legal and license-compliance folks.

Some previous links:
https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.os.vms/TOfRTK23U4Q/srFw6AmhyG8J
http://www.vms2linux.de/ods5fs.html

But this effort will usually be easier if somebody writes some code to 
access and to then format and export the data on OpenVMS, and then 
transfer the exported data over to Linux (or BSD or Windows or macOS or 
whatever the target of the port), and to process and import the data 
there.  AFAIK, there's no generic export-import tool for that purpose, 
any ability to mount the volumes and access some sequential files 
aside; OpenVMS and its apps tend to have more metadata in its files.  
RMS indexed files are keyed-access databases with all that entails for 
the file contents and the steps necessary are roughly analogous to 
trying to make sense of the innards of a SQLite database without using 
SQLite and without access to the SQLite data structure definitions, for 
instance.   The innards of most of the OpenVMS sequential file formats 
are more complex than that typical of sequential files Linux, too.



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