HP-UX partition on mainframe

[Darren_43]

Hi,

Can an HP-Ux (11i) file system or a partition be mapped on a mainframe (S/390 running MVS or OS/390)or vice versa?

Thank you for your input.

Darren

[Patrick Wallek]

Are you talking about trying to NFS mount a HP-UX export to a mainframe? If the mainframe supports NFS it should work.

[Steven E. Protter]

A HP-UX box could mount a partition set up and exported under NFS on a S/390 mainframe using NFS.

It could not boot off such a parition as far as I know.

SEP

[Dave La Mar]

Darren,
I find myself intrigued by your post. We are an old time XXX mainframe shop porting data back and forth to HP-UX.
So I am curious as to just what you are attempting to accomplish.
Little insight, at your convenience, appreciated.

Best regards,

dl

[A. Clay Stephenson]

The other thing that would make this fun is ASCII/EBCDIC conversion especially if there is mixed binary and text data.

[Dave La Mar]

A. Clay -
Agreed and quite frankly I have not encountered the ability to nsf mount to MVS, VM, or VSE.
Very interested in where this thread is going.

dl

[Dave La Mar]

Back to the top.

Darren -
Where are you going with this?

Best regards.

dl

[Bill Hassell]

If the difficulties dealing with Windows filesystems shared with HP-UX (ie, text files don't have the same line terminator) is difficult, mapping IBM mainframe filesystems will be all but meaningless. Generally, the character set on the mainframe is EBCDIC and is unreadable with any tool except dd on HP-UX (or most other opsystems for that matter). So even if the IBM box has NFS, what you see will be mostly meaningless and will require translation. If you want to share data (binary) files, you'll still have issues with the MANY different file types found on mainframes (fixed record length, variable record length, ISAM, KSAM, etc) which won't be decipherable without translation programs on the HP-UX side. If you need to share ASCII files, use ftp since it knows how to handle ASCII text files (does the right translation).

[Darren_43]

Thank you all for your valuable responses. Here is what we thought we can accomplish by NFS mount.
We receive ASCII files from legacy system via FTP. But there are 2 steps involved in this.
1) The data files are extracted from Adabas database in mainframe and stored in disk/tape in mainframe. (in EBCDIC format)
2) Then they are sent via FTP converted as ASCII to HP Ux server.

This consumes enormous amount of time which is unacceptable. We are implementing a new application that should replace the existing mainframe system. We have only a limited timeframe set by the client during data conversion as down time and the file transfer alone takes them all. We know that the network bandwidth at the client place is not quite high and were told that nothing can be done on that.

By NFS mounting the unix FS to mainframe, we are trying to do the following:
Extract the data from Adabas and store them directly to the mapped unix partition (Handle the EBCDIC to ASCII conversion in the extract program itself).

We understand that we have the same bandwidth but just wanted to see how much time we save. Our intention is to find out whether any one has already implemented this successfully.

We are currently performing the conversion in a development HP server as sample conversion and actual production system implementation will be in September. We are just trying to find what our best options are.

Thank you again,

Darren

[Dave La Mar]

Better picture. Thanks for the details. We went through same more than two years ago, but still put and get data between VSE and HP-UX daily. (Conversion was to take legacy DL/I + and convert to Oracle based applications.)
In any given day we will ftp VSAM and SAM files to HP-UX as well as get files and place into SAM files. In our environment we start jobs in VSE from an ftp to the RDR que following some processing on HP-UX as well as start Unix processes following a VSE job. All our cross system (NT is in the picture as well) activity is via ftp.
As you stated, since your bandwidth will not change I do not believe you would gain anything, even if an NFS mount was possible.
Your ipstack product in the MVS environment (probably CSI's) will handle all the same functionality.

Just a thought, but I think I would attack bandwidth.

Best of luck, I mean this in the sincerest sense. You will find it challenging and rewarding.

Regards,
dl

[A. Clay Stephenson]

The overhead associated with FTP is significantly less than that of NFS. Your performance will actually be worse. If you are manually ftp'ing the files then that could be a severe bottleneck -- as well as a pain to do. One method that scripts very well is Perl's Net::FTP module and it error checking is all but free -- something that is, at the very least, tedious will almost any other scripting method. Moreover, Perl 5.8 is available for your 390. There is also a module that does EBCDIC to ASCII conversions so that the same script could do everything. Perl's EBCDIC/ASCII conversion can easily handle mixed text and binary data -- something that more brute force approaches choke on.

[hein coulier]

hi, on mf you can define your own codepages and tell ftp to do the conversion. I'm not a mainframe guy, but we achieve this by the command "site xlate=hproman8" in the ftp, where hproman8 is the own made codepage.

Believe me, using the xlate command for all our different operating systems (dos, windows, hpux, mac, ...) saved us a lot of conversions and complaints from users.