src/docs/user/connecting-to-mainframe.txt

////
  Licensed to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) under one
  or more contributor license agreements.  See the NOTICE file
  distributed with this work for additional information
  regarding copyright ownership.  The ASF licenses this file
  to you under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the
  "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance
  with the License.  You may obtain a copy of the License at

      http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

  Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
  distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
  WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
  See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
  limitations under the License.
////

Connecting to a Mainframe
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Sqoop is designed to import mainframe datasets into HDFS. To do
so, you must specify a mainframe host name in the Sqoop +\--connect+ argument.

----
$ sqoop import-mainframe --connect z390
----

This will connect to the mainframe host z390 via ftp.

You might need to authenticate against the mainframe host to
access it. You can use the +\--username+ to supply a username to the mainframe.
Sqoop provides couple of different ways to supply a password,
secure and non-secure, to the mainframe which is detailed below.

.Secure way of supplying password to the mainframe
You should save the password in a file on the users home directory with 400
permissions and specify the path to that file using the *+--password-file+*
argument, and is the preferred method of entering credentials. Sqoop will
then read the password from the file and pass it to the MapReduce cluster
using secure means with out exposing the password in the job configuration.
The file containing the password can either be on the Local FS or HDFS.

Example:

----
$ sqoop import-mainframe --connect z390 \
    --username david --password-file ${user.home}/.password
----

Another way of supplying passwords is using the +-P+ argument which will
read a password from a console prompt.

.Non-secure way of passing password

WARNING: The +\--password+ parameter is insecure, as other users may
be able to read your password from the command-line arguments via
the output of programs such as `ps`. The *+-P+* argument is the preferred
method over using the +\--password+ argument. Credentials may still be
transferred between nodes of the MapReduce cluster using insecure means.

Example:

----
$ sqoop import-mainframe --connect z390 --username david --password 12345
----