Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uwm.edu!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!aplcen!haven!decuac!avolio
From: avolio@decuac.dec.com (Frederick M. Avolio)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.dec
Subject: Those stupid setld formats!
Message-ID: <2802@decuac.DEC.COM>
Date: 18 Nov 89 15:11:47 GMT
References: <1629@ultb.UUCP>
Sender: news@decuac.DEC.COM
Reply-To: avolio@decuac.dec.com
Organization: Digital Equipment Corp., SWS, Landover, MD
Lines: 48

In article <1629@ultb.UUCP> awpsys@ultb.UUCP (Andrew W. Potter) writes:
>
>Does ANYONE know how to simply extract files from those STUPID dec
>setld format files?   

I do.  In the documentation although somewhat buried.  See below.

> I need to get some kernal files, and I refuse
>to do the stupid DEC ultrix installation all over from scratch!
And that's your right, Andy, as an American. :-)


The stupid format of the stupid setld tape is documented in the stupid
oops... sorry, got caught up in it all :-). is documented in the
system managers doc set... I am at home so I don't have it in front of 
me, but it is in a section called something like creating 
software subset distributions or something like that.

By the way, I think the setld process and the ability to load and remove
subsets is great (especially when linked to the ability to do this
over a network w/o a tape device) so it'd be great if you would 
submit an spr explaining how you'd do it differently.  I suspect you want two
big tar files with everything.


NOw...  roughly the format of the tape (and this is documented and there are
schell scripts on the system that'd give you this info so I'm not giving
away any secrets)

BOOT (or empty file)	bs=512
SPACE (empty file)	bs=512
ROOT (or empty)		bs=10k
INSTCTRL (tar file -- see note below)  all the rest are bs=10k
SUBSET1
SUBSET2
 .
 .
 .

Pull out the INSTCTRL file and untar it into a subdirectory instctrl.
The file ending in .image in that directory tells you what subsets are on the
rest of the tape in what order.  The SUBSET.inv file tells you what files
are on each subset (inv for inventory).  All of the subset files are tar
files.

Hope this helps.

Fred