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My place of business currently uses Reflection for Unix and OpenVMS to handle a database of customers. I access this database directly through the Reflection emulation. The only way to get data out of Reflection is to navigate to a single customer via keyboard input and print the information to a .txt.

Is there anyway I can access the VM other than through Reflection with the end goal of automating retrieval of customer information from a Java script executed outside of the Reflection environment? This is the information I can gather via the Reflection interface about what I am connecting to:

At the bottom of the Reflection interface - VT500-7 -- HOST_NAME via SECURE SHELL

Via the Connection Setup drop-down: 

Host name: HOST_NAME
SSH config scheme: AutoKeyLogin
User name: username

Via the Security... button:

General tab:

Port number: 22
User Authentication: [x] Public Key
                     [x] Password

User Keys tab:

Use   Name           Type    Location
[x]   username1user  DSA     C:\Documents\PathToSSHKey\.ssh

Host Keys tab:

Host                          Type  Fingerprint
HOST_NAME, 111.1.111.11, 22   DSA   39:14:f3:123:fds:restOfFingerprint

There is more information available if the solution is possible but I have just not provided enough to solve it, so please ask.

Given that I have the host name, port, .ssh, and host key, is it possible to connect to and read from the VM that I am otherwise connecting to normally via the Reflection emulator?

Dylan Russell
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1 Answers1

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NO. Reflection (other example is PuTTY) is just a dumb-terminal emulator, here using the (secure) SSH protocol to connect to some Operating System. From the information provided we cannot even tell which OS. Maybe OpenVMS maybe some Unix. Most certainly not a 'VM', but a physical box. Maybe a Alpha, Integrity, Sun, IBM or Intel server.

IF, big if, it is OpenVMS you would possibly see something like this flash by on entry:

XXX - HP rx2600  (1.50GHz/6.0MB) OpenVMS IA64 V8.3-1H1
Last interactive login on Thursday, 7-DEC-2017 13:23:19.83
Last non-interactive login on Wednesday, 6-DEC-2017 12:35:45.80

Most likely username uses is set up to always start a (shell) script which starts a menu from which a program is activated, which knows how to access data record. IF is it OpenVMS then the actual data is likely stored in RMS (indexed) files, but it could in a proper (Oracle RDB or RDBMS) database.

If bulk access to the data is needed then you need to talk to the system/application manager for the system 'HOST_NAME' and ask them about the application and its database.

You may find that there is FTP, ODBC or JDBC or natice DB (OCI?) access to the data avaiable already, or that this can be requested. Likely tools in this space are ConnX, Attunity Connect, and such.

First you'll need to find out which OS/Platform/Version, which application (3rd party? home grown? 4GL? Cobol? Basic? and ultimately, which database/storage method.

That's not to say that some terminal emulator cannot be 'tricked' (google - screen scraping) to be programmed to fetch a series of data on command, but that will always be error prone and laboriously for limited volumes.

You are better of trying to get proper data access.

Good luck! You'll need some.

Hein

Hein
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  • Thank you for the thorough response. I will post back here if I ever manage to get in contact with the system administrator. – Dylan Russell Feb 20 '18 at 01:28