[daip] Some UID unusable

[Eric Greisen]

Please adopt some other form of e-mail.  I get 100's of spam a day and
your e-mail comes with plain text hidden away as if it were something
else - like about 1/2 of the spams.  I deleted this messgae and then
wondered about it so....

Chao-Shan Chen writes:
 > Dear Eric,
 > My colleague came up with an idea, to export FITS files ( lots of, in
 > batch,say FITTP ) to DVD/CD writer instead of traditional tape. Somehow
 > they prefer CD/DVD than tapes.
 > 
 > In this case, we need to try to simulate a 'virtual tape drive' and make
 > AIPS think it a real tape drive. The 'virtual tape drive' can be a unix
 > disk image file, or directly CD/DVD RW media.
 > 
 > Although they can first export fits to FITS area on hdd, them copy/burn
 > it to CD/DVD. But they always need to do lots of files and want to write
 > to tape devices directly in batch. ( Virtual tape drive, in his wish ).
 > 
 > Do you think this possible ? Or any comments?
 > Or can you direct me to something further?

The solution to write to some disk area and then to burn the CD/DVD is
the only one that will work so far as I know.  The burning must be
done in a single operation that involves creating a Microsoft-like
file system on the CD/DVD and then following with all the data.  If
this were not the case, then one could treat it as disk area and
simply direct the FITS-disk files to it right out of aips.

Eric Greisen