NICOF - Non-Invasive COmmunication Facility

NICOF is a set of programs for VM/370-R6 the mainframe operating system running under the Hercules emulator giving virtual machines the ability to actively communicate with the outside world of the emulated mainframe.

Based on proxy VMs running inside VM/370 and a Java program running besides of the Hercules emulator, it provides a set of APIs to user VMs running CMS (the standard OS for users of VM/370):

• a BSD-like socket API (subset) supporting IPv4 stream and datagram sockets

• stdio-like APIs allowing to access files on the system hosting the Hercules emulator

• a low-level API for using the NICOF infrastructure for own communication protocols

Some programs built with these APIs are available:

• CMSFTPD, an FTP server running in an user VM under CMS, providing access to the minidisks of this VM from outside the VM/370 resp. Hercules machine with standard FTP clients.

• NHFSand HACC, CMS programs allowing to access files in the file system on the outside of the VM/370 resp. the Hercules machine.

The files in this repository will probably be interesting only for users of VM/370-R6 SixPack 1.2 (or older), although NICOF is known to work on VM/ESA 1.5 (with 370 feature). These users will however probably already know NICOF, as it was published first in the files area of the Yahoo H390-VM discussion group, the main exchange platform for VM/370 users.

This repository is an alternative location for the tools.

History and status

The first experiments for accessing low level assembler functionality from C programs under CMS started in June 2012, targeting communication with an external Java program which would provide services of the OS hosting Hercules.

The first public release of NICOF was for version 0.5.0, which provided the basic communication infrastructure as well as the first usable tool NHFS.

The next release was version 0.6.0 featuring the socket API (stream sockets) and the FTP server CMSFTPD.

Follow-up updates introduced small modifications to allow using NICOF with (slightly) newer versions of VM/xxx than VM/370-R6, provided S/370-I/O is still supported. These modifications became part of version 0.7.0.

The last publication as version 0.7.0 is simply an update instead of a complete installation package as the previous version. It is merely a delta to a working NICOF 0.6.0 installation in a VM/370 system. Version 0.7.0 mostly adds datagram socket support for the socket API and the ability to give an IP address to VMs using the socket API.

Development of NICOF ended with version 0.7.0.

License

The NICOF binaries and sources are released to the public domain.

Repository subdirectories

The directories cms and java contain the sources for the last version 0.7.0 of NICOF:

• the directory cms contains the files to build the NICOF components for the mainframe side, besides the ASSEMBLE, H and C files these are the EXEC scripts for building and running the MODULE files as well as some support files.

• the directory java contains the Eclipse project for the external Java program of the NICOF communication infrastructure.

The directory publications has a subdirectory for each release of NICOF uploaded to the files area of the Yahoo H390-VM discussion group.

All of the packages contain both the binaries as well as the source code for the CMS libraries and programs resp. the external Java process.

These are the following versions published at the specified date:

• 0.5.0 : 2012-12-09

• 0.6.0 : 2014-07-30

• 0.7.0 : 2017-09-20

Each subdirectory contains the original ZIP-files published for the corresponding release, as well as the documentation PDF file contained in this ZIP-file.
The files to be installed on the emulated mainframe are delivered as AWS tape files, which can be mounted by the Hercules emulator. The tapes were written with the CMS TAPE command in versions 0.5.0 and 0.6.0 and with the CMS VMFPLC2 command in version 0.7.0.