[McIDAS #WUE-272422]: GOES 12 or 13

Hi Gustavo,

I got some time this afternoon to logon to unidata.at.fcen.uba.ar and look
at the setup you have for creating GIF images for your website in the 'ldm'
account.  I had to make a number of changes to get things working; here
is a list of what I did:

- specify sourcing of the correct GEMPAK environment file:

  . /home/gempak/NAWIPS/Gemenviron.profile

  You were sourcing the environment file that was for v5.11.1, and
  you are now using v6.2.0.  /home/gempak/NAWIPS is a link that
  always points to the currently used installation of GEMPAK, so
  this new specification should work from now on.

- correct a typing mistake in /home/ldm/util/sat-solo.sh.  The line
  that copies the GIF file that is created by the GEMPAK code was
  split into two lines:

cp /home/ldm/web/sat/s_${curday}${curmon}${curyear}_${curtim}_ir.gif 
/var/ftp/pub/last.
gif

  The strange errors you were reporting in a previous email were caused by the 
'gif'
  being on a separate line... GEMPAK has a routine named 'gif', and it was this
  routine that was being run and listing out the strange error messages.

- correct entries in ~ldm/etc/pqact.gempak_images that EXEC the util/sat-solo.sh
  script.  There were two problems in those entries:

  - the formulation of the name of the file to pass to util/sat-solo.sh was
    incorrect

  - the actions you have were trying to create GIF images for both GOES-East
    (GOES-13) and GOES-West (GOES-11) image sectors.  The util/sat-solo.sh
    script, however, specifies the area to display (through the AREA and
    GAREA parameters) to be over Argentina.  This will fail for the GOES-West
    images in the UNIWISC (aka MCIDAS) datastream since those images do
    not cover any portion of the area specified.

    I changed the patterns for the three types of images (vis, wv, and ir)
    so that only GOES-East images would cause util/sat-solo.sh to be run

- I had to change the read/write permission for the /var/ftp/pub directory
  so that the util/sat-solo.sh script run by user 'ldm' had permission
  to write to the directory.

- I noticed that the mail file for 'ldm' was HUGE (approx. 1.2 GB).  The
  file (/var/spool/mail/ldm) was being filled with messages that were
  generated each time a script was run from 'ldm's cron.  I did two things
  to ease the situation:

  - add a line to the beginning of 'ldm's crontab that says to _not_
    send mail messages (MAILTO="")

  - zero out 'ldm's mail file (cat /dev/null > /var/spool/mail/ldm)

  NB: there is another huge mail file in /var/spool/mail:

  [root@unidata mail]# ls -alt /var/spool/mail/rmtcuba
  -rw-rw----  1 rmtcuba       mail 623521893 Dec  1 22:30 rmtcuba

  The contents of this file should be examined to determine if any
  of the mail messages should be saved and then zeroed in the same
  way as I did for 'ldm's mail file:

  <as 'root'>
  cat /dev/null > /var/spool/mail/rmtcuba

Some other things you may want to consider:

- the amount of free disk space on unidata.at.fcen.uba.ar is decreasing.
  You may want to consider doing some scouring in the data directories
  being updated by processes run for/by 'ldm'

- I am not sure exactly what the scripts run by cron are doing, but you
  may want to review them to make sure that they are doing things
  properly.  What I am thinking of is if any of those scripts run
  GEMPAK routines and are sourcing the incorrect GEMPAK environment
  file, etc.

I will take a look at the processing being done on unidata.at.fcen.uba.ar
tomorrow to make sure that the changes I made are working as hoped/expected.

Cheers,

Tom
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Ticket Details
===================
Ticket ID: WUE-272422
Department: Support McIDAS
Priority: Normal
Status: Closed