How does IBM RDZ work on a PC to access the mainframe file system?
I have heard many times that although NFS file systems are available on IBM mainframes, they are often left off, presumably to minimize the security risks of the mainframe to the rest of the world.
Considering that I would like to build PC-based tools that cover and process files on the mainframe, this creates a simple problem ("open NFS file" \ mainframe \ foo ") is much more difficult; that I can count on providing file system access in network environment? (Linux systems offer NFS over Samba pretty much the same way, so it's easy).
IBM offers Rational Developer for Z, a variant of Eclipse used by IBM COBOL programmers. RDZ seems to have direct access to the IBM mainframe file system. What do they use to do this? Why is it not available to me, and if so, what is it?
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RDz has a running task (daemon in UNIX-talk) that runs on the z / OS host and accepts connections from the Eclipse plug-in. The protocol is proprietary, so you can hardly find out any information about it.
And RDz isn't just for COBOL programmers. It is used in many stores where people want to keep all their source code on the mainframe - why keep two separate repositories? This is why it has these longname / shortname and ASCII / EBCDIC translations to turn those wicked Java paths into our beautifully elegant 8 character names and allow us to read them under z / OS, although the ISPF editor team has "source ascii"
eased this last concern somewhat.
If you want to do a similar thing, you will need to copy your own started task in order to accept incoming connections from your clients. It's not as difficult as it sounds. In fact, you will be doing this in a UNIX environment, since USS (UNIX System Services, renamed OpenMVS) ships with z / OS as part of the base operating system software. And it allows you to transparently access z / OS USS files and datasets / elements.
Next, you will need to convince the mainframe stores that your task is not a security threat. Let me know how it works for you :-)
You may find it easier to just make NFS a prerequisite for your software. Then at least it's IBM's security issue, not yours.
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