========================== Flat-Handler 1.3 ========================== ====================================================================== A zany disk filing system, written by Olaf 'Olsen' Barthel of MXM. Copyright, © 1990 by MXM. Shareware, all rights reserved. No guarantee of any kind is made that the program(s) described in this document are 100% reliable. You use this material on your own risk. ============================== Purpose =============================== ====================================================================== The university I am studying at has just got rid of its old IBM mainframe monster which has been replaced by set of Sun4 Sparc IPC workstations. Each station has its own disk drive built into the main unit. Transfer of data to and from the disk is easy if you know how to accomplish it. Standard 3˝" disks can be formatted in vanilla MS-DOS format (double sided, 9 sectors, 512 bytes each) and read using MessyDOS/CrossDOS. Unfortunately, `pcfs' is not available on the machines I am working at, still using `tar' makes it easy to exchange files between both computers. The Amiga does not support block mapped files in the same way Un*x does. My first attempt to read tar archives written to disk would therefore consist of creating a disk-like file on my harddisk (using Matt Dillon's fmsdisk.device) and reading the disk-file with tar. This being not the ideal solution I immediately started writing a custom filing system to map all block-oriented filing devices to virtual files. =============================== Usage ================================ ====================================================================== Copy `Flat-Handler' to your L: directory (copy Flat-Handler L:) and add the supplied `MountList' file to your DEVS:MountList (type >>DEVS:MountList MountList). After that, the FLAT:-device is ready to be mounted (mount FLAT:). Listing `FLAT:' will display something like the following: MSH 737280 ----r--- Today 16:42:01 DF0 901120 ----rw-- Today 16:42:01 DF1 0 -------- Today 16:42:01 DH0 10948608 ----rw-- Today 16:42:01 DH1 10616832 ----rw-- Today 16:42:01 Each one of these `files' represents a disk-like block-oriented filing device (which has the same name, only the colon is left out). You can copy, type, read and write each device just like an ordinary file. Each read/write call is mapped to a disk access which allows archiving whole disks with LhArc or diskcopy'ing with the CLI copy-command. The protection bits refer to the state of the disk drive and the data media within: r - There is a disk in the disk drive. w - The disk is write-enabled. All the other protection bits are by default cleared (you won't be able to delete a disk drive, set the `archived' bit or other foolish bits). The file creations dates are fake, and the file sizes will never change (never say never: if there is no disk in the approriate drive the size of a file will drop to zero). The handler itself supports only the basic command set a simple filing system needs to supply (read, write, open, close, lock, unlock, duplock, die). ================ Transferring files from/to the Sun4 ================= ====================================================================== To transfer files from/to the Sun4 workstation you will need MessyDOS or CrossDOS and the Amiga implementation of the `tar' program. The disk format on the Amiga (MSH:, DI0:, etc.) side must be configured for a double-sided, 80-track disk with 9 blocks per track. These settings represent the `factory settings' with which MessyDOS/CrossDOS are shipped, so there is probably no need to change them. Now it's time to initialize a disk, this can either be done on the Amiga (using "format drive msh: name Blank noicons") or on the Sun (using "fdformat -l"). Here are the basic commands to get tar to create and extract disk archives (tar offers a lot more options which you will probably want to study later): To create an archive: Sun4: tar -cf /dev/fd0 Amiga: tar -cf flat:msh To extract files from an archive: Sun4: tar -xf /dev/fd0 Amiga: tar -xf flat:msh To eject the disk from the Sun4 disk drive enter `eject'. =============================== Author =============================== ====================================================================== This program was written by Olaf Barthel of MXM. All files have been placed in the public domain. You may freely distribute this material, even a small copy fee is okay but everything which looks like commercial distribution is forbidden. Still you may use this material for software development without giving credit to the original author. Send new program revisions, comments, bug reports, donations, unmarried sisters, non-poisoned candy, home-grown palm trees, horoscopes, promising capital investments, etc. to: Olaf Barthel, MXM Brabeckstrasse 35 D-3000 Hannover 71 Federal Republic of Germany ============ Revision history (most recent change first) ============= ====================================================================== V1.3 Added support for ACTION_COPY_DIR packet. Added GnuTar-Support. (JD) V1.2 You couldn't change the current directory to `FLAT:' and examine the virtual files without having to specify a full path name (such as `flat:df0'), this has been fixed. V1.1 Extended release supporting all available block-oriented filing devices. V1.0 First simple release supporting only a single disk drive.