[daip] old aips data

[Eric Greisen]

Joe Cammisa wrote:
> greetings, eric, and pardon me for interrupting you with my (hopefully)
> trivial aips problem.
> 
> i find myself asked to retrieve some old aips data from tape.  the tapes
> in question are of the dds2 variety; i doubt it will be especially
> difficult to locate a dds2 tape device and attach it to my linux server. 
> however, i'm pretty sure that the data on the tapes was written by a sun
> server, so i have my doubts on whether or not it will be binary compatible
> with my linux operating system.  does this depend upon the type of data on
> the tape?  and if i do indeed have a binary compatibility issue here,
> would you have any suggestions on how i might successfully migrate the
> data from the tape to my ext3 filesystem?

It really does depend on the form of the data on the tape.  If you 
followed our advice and used FITTP to write the data, then they may be 
read directly by LINUX or MAC boxes with no issues expected.

If you backed up the data area itself, then the files are in SUN byte 
order.  If you can get that data area back to disk, there is an AIPS 
stand-alone program called REBYTE which will convert the SUN ordered 
files into Intel-chip (LINUX, LNX64, MACINT) byte order.  I worry that 
you may have used a SUN-specific compressed format (like but not tar), 
in which case you may have trouble disentangling the files from the tape.

There are still SUN systems in use various places so you may find a 
colleague somewhere who could help in this last case.

Eric Greisen