Anybody familiar with print streams (AFPDS) and tapes on an AS/400 (iSeries) mainframe?

[jitspoe]

We've got some data from a tape that's AFP data... almost, but not quite. I think there's probably some kind of tape filesystem wrapped around it, but I'm not sure.

 

[sieistganzfett]

hi, are you trying to restore the data from the tape? if your trying to access the data on a tape you need to use the software that backed it up to read it (i never worked on a mainframe though, but my experience with tape restores involve using the tape backup software)

 

[jitspoe]

Actually, we have our own in-house tape dumping software which just dumps raw data off of the tape. We provide conversion services, by the way. The customer wants these back as PDF's. It's coming out of RDARS. We've handled RDARS data in the past, but it was simply text data compressed with an LZW variant. This is completely different. It's uncompressed data that appears to be AFP, but it's not quite AFP... some applications can parse some of the data out of it, but nothing will display it correctly. I'm just trying to figure out if it's actually AFP with some kind of tape format junk wrapped around it, or if it's a different format strongly resembling AFP (the IBM formats often share many characteristics).

 

[sieistganzfett]

sorry i have no idea and cant really help, but my bet would be its just strongly resembling AFP and is actually a different format since only some apps can parse the data out. good luck,