File Transfer to and from Guest Operating System

This section provides some examples of how to transfer data to/from the guest operating system. These examples are intended for illustrative purposes only. The actual file transfer (especially in the context of a migration from physical to emulated hardware) depends on the exact customer environment and requirements.

Transferring Files to/from an HP-UX Guest

HP-UX offers various commands and methods to copy files between the guest system and other systems.

Examples:

  • Copying data using physical media, e.g., a tape drive, to transfer data between HP-UX running on Charon-PAR and another HP-UX system.
  • NFS: the HP-UX can mount a remote filesystem or a remote system can mount a filesystem exported by the guest HP-UX. Then data can be exchanged between the two systems.
  • File transfer programs, e.g., sftp and scp.
  • General backup and recovery programs in conjunction with a file transfer program, e.g., tar, cpio, pax, fbackup/frecover.

The following section will provide some examples. Please refer to your system's documentation for additional information and methods not covered in the examples.

Please note:

When using SSH-based applications (ssh, scp, sftp) for connecting to a HP-UX system from a modern Linux system, you may run into a problem caused by a mismatch of available key exchange methods. The error shown will be similar to the sample below:

Unable to negotiate with 192.168.2.87 port 22: no matching key exchange method found. Their offer: diffie-hellman-group-exchange-sha1,diffie-hellman-group14-sha1,diffie-hellman-group1-sha1

In such cases, you can use the following workaround:

Add the SSH option -oKexAlgorithms=+diffie-hellman-group1-sha1 to your command.

Transferring Files with SCP

With SCP, single files or directory structures (recursive copy) can be copied to and from HP-UX.

The following table shows some SCP syntax examples

TaskCommand
Copy single file to another system$ scp <local-file> <user>@<remote-host>:<remote-file-path>
Copy a directory recursively to another system$ scp -r <local-path> <user>@<remote-host>:<remote-path>
Copy a single file from another system$ scp <user>@<remote-host>:<remote-file-path> <local-file>
Copy a directory recursively from another system$ scp -r <user>@<remote-host>:<remote-path> <local-path>

The following example shows how a small directory tree is copied to a user account named charon from another system:

$ scp -r ./Tmp charon@192.168.2.107:

charon@192.168.2.107's password:

file4.txt  100%    0     0.0KB/s   00:00   

file3.txt  100%    0     0.0KB/s   00:00   

file1.txt  100%    0     0.0KB/s   00:00   

file2.txt  100%    0     0.0KB/s   00:00

Transferring Files with SFTP

SFTP is another file transfer program that can be used for secure file transfers between the HP-UX guest system and other systems. The SFTP program can be used interactively (similarly to FTP) and in non-interactive mode. When used in interactive mode, you can use the help command to learn about the command syntax. SFTP can resume interrupted file transfers.

The following example shows how a directory structure is recursively copied from the guest system (IP address 192.168.2.107 in the example) by another system:

$ sftp charon@192.168.2.107

charon@192.168.2.107's password:

Connected to 192.168.2.107.

sftp> ls Tmp

Tmp/A  Tmp/B  Tmp/C 

sftp>

sftp> get -r Tmp/

Fetching /home/charon/Tmp/ to Tmp

Retrieving /home/charon/Tmp

Retrieving /home/charon/Tmp/B

Retrieving /home/charon/Tmp/B/b

Retrieving /home/charon/Tmp/B/a

Retrieving /home/charon/Tmp/A

Retrieving /home/charon/Tmp/A/b

Retrieving /home/charon/Tmp/A/a

Retrieving /home/charon/Tmp/C

sftp>

sftp> bye


Using General Backup and Restore Commands

When transferring larger amounts of data (e.g., when moving application data from one HP-UX system to another), it is more efficient create an archive of the required data before transferring them and unpacking the data on the target system.

HP-UX offers a large number of such programs. For example:

  • cpio
  • tar
  • dump/restore for HFS filesystems
  • vxdump/vxrestore for VxFS filesystems
  • fbackup/frecover for selective file backup and restore
  • make_net_recovery / make_tape_recovery when working with Ignite
  • pax to create and restore archive files of different formats; there is also an pax_enh package to support file sizes larger than 8GB in version 11.23 (default in HP-UX 11.31).

Please note:

  • The cpio and the standard tar command on HP-UX have restrictions with respect to the largest file size they can handle: the maximum file size for cpio is 2GB, the maximum for tar is 8GB.
  • The utilities tar, cpio, and pax can be used to transfer archives between HP-UX and other operating systems. 

When creating an archive using one of the above commands, you can copy the archive to the target HP-UX system and restore it there. Alternatively, you can pipe the archive command on the source system through ssh to the respective restore command on the target.

The following example shows how to use fbackup/frecover through ssh to copy files between two HP-UX systems:

On the source system:

# fbackup -i <source-path> -f - | ssh <remote-user>@<target-ip> "(cd <destination-dir>; frecover -r -f -)"


The following example shows how to use pax through ssh to copy files between two HP-UX systems or between an HP-UX system and, for example, a Linux system:

On the source system:

# pax -w <source-path> | ssh <remote-user>@<target-ip> "(cd <destination-dir>; pax -v -r -pe)"


Please note: Take care not to overwrite any files on the target system! Please read the respective man-pages carefully to learn about additional parameters of the commands and their proper use.


Transferring Files to/from an MPE/iX Guest

If you have enough disk space on the MPE/iX guest, you can copy existing MPE/iX software, data, and settings to the guest MPE/iX system. Charon-PAR comes with MPE/iX 7.5 already installed and patched. So you avoid the most difficult part of setting up a new system.

Please note:

  • Charon-PAR comes with MPE/iX 7.5. Note that there are significant restrictions for earlier MPE/iX releases. Charon-PAR may not run with such releases. When using the provided system disk, you must not overwrite any MPE files with copies from earlier MPE releases. As a general rule, specify the ;KEEP keyword on :RESTORE commands, especially when using STORE tapes that may contain PUB.SYS files. It is strongly recommended to use the MPE/iX 7.5 disk provided by Stromasys. Should you have different requirements, please discuss them with your Stromasys representative.
  • This section only describes general methods for file transfer. The specific data transfer required to migrate a physical system to an emulated system (e.g. copying the account structure) is not covered by the user's guide. To obtain support for system migration, contact your Stromasys representative or Stromasys partner.

File Transfer Options

The traditional methods used to move files between systems are available also available for Charon-PAR emulated systems.

When using the original vendor or third-party Store, you should specify the ;COMPRESS (or equivalent) keyword to ensure that the resulting archive files are as small as possible. Compression can reduce space required to store TurboIMAGE files quite considerably. The ;PARTDB keyword is also recommended, to include any partial database files you may have.
To ensure that all files in the Hierarchical File System (HFS) are included store the " / " fileset; Store also interprets the " @.@.@ " fileset as " / ".

Physical Tapes

There are two ways you can connect a tape device to a Charon-PAR host system. If you build your server with a SCSI card, you can connect any SCSI tape device that works with MPE/iX. You can also connect a HP USB DAT 72 drive to the Charon-PAR host system which offers a low-cost solution if you currently use DDS3 or DDS4 media.

Any original vendor or third-party backup product may be used to restore files on the Charon-PAR guest system.

Using FTP

FTP can be used to transfer individual files. However, it is far more efficient to use it in conjunction with any STORE product that can store-to-disk, preferably compressed. Use FTP to transfer the resulting archive file(s) to the MPE/iX guest system and restore-from-disk to extract the contents. Restore-from-disk results in files being created with correct attributes and security settings which is not necessarily the case when transferring individual files with FTP. This method does require enough free disk space on both systems to hold the store-to-disk archive file(s). If disk space is tight, individual accounts (or even groups) can be processed instead of storing the whole system. Any original vendor or third-party backup product may be used to restore files from disk on the Charon-PAR guest system.

Other Methods

When available, any other MPE/iX file transfer can be used, e.g., :DSCOPY , Samba, or NFS.

Cloud-specific File Transfer Options

Depending on the customer requirements, the configuration of the original system, and the amount of data, different data transfer options may have to be applied. The various cloud providers offer add-on services to facilitate the transfer of large amounts of data from the customer premises to the cloud instances. This section provides a brief list of such services. However, these services are independent of the Stromasys product offering. So always refer to the documentation of your cloud provider for up-to-date information.

  • Microsoft Azure data transfer offering: for large data transfers, Azure offers special data transfer services.
    Please refer to the description of the Azure Data Transfer Solutions for more information.

  • OCI data transfer offering: for large data transfers, Oracle offers its Data Transfer Services

  • AWS data transfer offering: for large data transfers, Amazon offers a special service, AWS Snowball

  • Google data transfer offering: for large data transfers, Google offers its Data Transfer services.

  • IBM data transfer offering: for large data transfers IBM offers its Mass Data Migration services.



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