getting data to an updated machine

[Brian K. White]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Jeff Harrison" <jeffaharrison at yahoo.com>
To: "Creative Photography and Video" <cpvphoto at cpvphoto.com>; 
<Filepro-list at lists.celestial.com>
Sent: Wednesday, February 01, 2006 8:37 PM
Subject: Re: getting data to an updated machine


> --- Creative Photography and Video
> <cpvphoto at cpvphoto.com> wrote:
>
>> I have an older version of filepro running on a
>> xenix operating system and a wyse 486 machine. If I
>> want to put this on a newer updated machine and
>> linux what might be suggested in getting data over
>> to the new machine.
>>
>> Steve>
>
> It depends on the type of system to which you will be
> transferring the data.  The byte order is different on
> certain machines, so depending on the destination you
> may need to run either the fptransfer program or the
> swapcpu program.  If the byte order is the same then
> you should be able to simply tar up the data files and
> indexes, then ftp and un-tar them on the destination
> machine, then rebuild your indexes.
>
> You may run into a problem with indexes - there are
> programs out there that will document them for you,
> and re-build them.  You may need to look into that if
> you need to go the swapcpu route.
>
> You will of course need to make sure you have filepro
> installed properly on the new machine, and configured
> similarly to your xenix box.  You will probably want
> to copy over the $PFPROG/fp/lib/edits and
> $PFPROG/fp/lib/config files, and configure the system
> with the same printer names if possible.
>
> I believe that the really old versions of filepro had
> a different menu structure - I'm not sure if you will
> run into a problem with that or not.
>
> Good Luck.

His initial and possibly biggest problem is physically accomplishing the 
transfer.
TCP was available for Xenix but I never saw a copy.

If the old box still runs and has a tape drive that is modern enough to 
install even temporarily on a new machine That that's probably the easiest.
 (ie, is it at least ide or scsi? vs one of the old proprietary interfaces 
like wangtek which will not likely have a working driver on linux)

If the old box has an intelligent serial card (digiboard, equinox, 
cyclades..., and the brand doesn't automatically mean it's a intelligent 
card, there are dumb and intelligent models) then getting a copy of rz/sz or 
preferably kermit onto the old box and using a null modem serial cable is 
do-able. Xenix couldn't do over 9600 natively, regardless of the hardware, 
but the drivers for the intelligent versions of those aftermarket cards 
added the ability to take full advantage of the hardware. a few hundred megs 
at 115200 if you can use hardware flow control (also provided by the 
drivers, natively you'd need to use the modem control version of the tty 
which would require special jumpers in the cabling to fake carrier-detect)

If you have the ability to install a hard drive into the old box temporarily 
then this is also pretty easy.
add a 2nd drive to the old box, make a 512 meg fdisk partition, and cpio 
your whole filesystem (root & all mounted fs's if you had a seperate "u" for 
example) and direct the output right to the raw device nide for the 
partition on the 2nd drive, then read it back in in linux. I mean, don't 
bother making a filesystem on the 2nd drive, just an fdisk partition, no 
divvy, no mkfs. Or really, don't even bother with the fdisk. just run mkdev 
hd up to the point where it runs fdisk, and make note of the disk device 
shown in fdisk (/dev/rhd10 for 2nd disk for example), quit out of mkdev hd 
at that point and have cpio write directly to that device just like it was a 
tape. find / -print |cpio -oBv >/dev/rhd10

Normally of course you would not think of this as among your easier choices, 
but with an old incompatible tape drive, or broken, or none, and linux's 
inability to read the old drive directly because of the divvy divisions, and 
no tcp, and serial being slow and hard to get set up and working well unless 
you're familiar with it, temporarily installing a hard drive and treating it 
like a big floppy or tape actually becomes attractive. And it's going to be 
a lot faster than the serial even if you had the best type of serial card 
and were completely fresh in your serial cabling and kermit/cu/other 
commands and did everything perfectly right the first time.

And all of the above assumes the new box is x86, no 64 bit amd or intel, no 
powerpc, etc... You can move to those platforms but it just takes yet more 
consideration and it's already a bit of a chore without that.

Then comes the interesting times of getting a new linux version of fp and 
running the code in it and tracking down all the horrible broken assumptions 
scattered all through it. :)
I've done exactly all this several times (take app off old xenix box and get 
running on linux or newer sco) so it's not too awful but don't hope for a 
second that it will "just work". It will need some real massaging for a 
while. Everything that looks broken at first is probably completely fixable. 
Sometimes it's a case of a hundred little things rather than a few big 
things.

Brian K. White  --  brian at aljex.com  --  http://www.aljex.com/bkw/
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