[daip] AIPS, Dat and VLA data

[Melinda Taylor]

Hello,

I am wondering if you can help me at all with this problem.

A user has some VLA data on dat tape that he wants to reduce in AIPS.
He runs AIPS on his linux system and the DAT drive is on a solaris box.

The task he wishes to use is FILLM.

Now as far as I can tell from what Ir ead the only way I can share a 
tape drive within aips is if the machine which houses the tape drive 
also has AIPS installed - is this correct?

For a number of reason this machine does not and cannot have AIPS 
installed on it. However I have setup passwordless access (using ssh and 
passphrase authentication) to the tape drive on the solaris machine 
(called bat) from the linux machine running AIPS.

So on the machine running linux he can type

linux machine% ssh bat mt -f /dev/rmt/0l status
/dev/rmt/0l: no tape loaded or drive offline

and it returns the appropriate result without asking for a passwd.

So my first question is:

1) is there anyway to use this tape drive within AIPS if the machine 
housing the tape dirve does not have aips installed taking into 
consideration the tape drive can be accessed from the AIPS machine?


If not, I can do a raw read of the VLA tape using the dd command and get 
each data file off. The files I extract are identified as "raw G3 data, 
byte-padded" when I apply the 'file' command in linux.

Is there anyway the FILLM task can be modified to read these files from 
the disk and then convert them to fits. As far as I can tell it requires 
these files to be on the tape drive?

Anyhelp would be appreciated.

Many Thanks,

melinda