Tuesday, March 27, 2012

FTP from a mainframe (z/os) box

Has anyone been able to use an ftp task to pull a flat file from a z/os mainframe? The ftp task appears to want the remote file to begin with a /, which pulls you into unix system services on z/os.

Thanks!
HarryHarry,

We do not support paths that do not start with a /. Please feel free to file a bug about this.

Thanks,
Matt|||Same problem makes it impossible to pull a file off a VMS system. Ironic that in the land of the backslash, the Unix convention is mandatory ....
|||Well now, that's a big bummer. About all of my interfaces involve mainframe datasets.
|||

Will Wilson wrote:

Well now, that's a big bummer. About all of my interfaces involve mainframe datasets.

I worked around this by installing IIS on the SQL Server 2005 and writing scripts on the VMS side to transfer the files into Windows instead. This is actually more flexible as the scripting capabilities of VMS (DCL) are far more powerful. You can then use the Foreach Loop container to iterate through the files in SQL Server 2005.

The downside is that I don't like having an FTP service running on my database server; also, this workaround requires you to have sufficient access to the mainframe to create the scripts etc. The latter is not an issue in my case as I administer both machines.

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