20040603: setup of bigbird and Level II data (cont.)

>From: Gerry Creager N5JXS <address@hidden>
>Organization: Texas A&M University -- AATLT
>Keywords: 200405311647.i4VGlNtK006820 LDM IDD THREDDS

Hi Gerry,

re: bigbird setup

>It makes sense.  I've been task-switching a lot with proposals for 
>Mesonet, Homeland Security Cyber Infrastructure training, and ocean 
>observing, as well as trying to grok what's been happening here.

OK.  I was concerned that I was not getting the concept of the change
across.  I think the current setup on bigbird is the one most easily
maintained during upgrades of the LDM and GEMPAK.

>Tonight, reading what you've done, it does make sense and sounds like a 
>good way to go.

OK, good.  I see from the disk usage stats ('df -k') that there
is plenty of room for data.  Because of this, I changed the crontab
entry that scours the Level III products from 4 days to 10.

>Now: Alternative B, food for thought:  Use bigbird solely as a server 
>and do the decodes and processing on another box?  In a sense, that's 
>what I do on Gemdata, although I've got mesodata doing ingest, decode 
>and PostGres.  I'm about to split out some of that functionality, and 
>I'm thinking I can manage ingest, decode and gempak processing on 
>Gemdata, and let mesodata do the rdbms work.  Mesonet does a remote 
>connection to mesodata now for the rdbms queries to make the maps.

Having a dedicated machine makes sense if/when its relay duties
are of paramount importance.  This is, in fact, the way we run
thelma.ucar.edu.

Here is an Alternative C, food for thought: setup THREDDS serving
on bigbird and open it up for community access.  Given its  resources,
I could see that bigbird could play an important role in the set
of Cooperating Community data servers that I setup a couple of years
ago.  Those machines serve data mostly through McIDAS ADDE, but the
plan has always been to expand their use into full THREDDS servers
(McIDAS ADDE is one part of THREDDS).

>If we leave bigbird as a server, capable of talking to the world for 
>Level II Tier II, as well as feeding me, and potentially the rest of the 
>Atmospheric Sciences dept., that might be a little more efficient.

I agree, it would be more efficient.

>To 
>that end, I'm thinking of adding another ethernet card (beyond the one 
>I'll put in the next time we decide to pull a maintenance window on 
>bigbird to support Internet2 IPv6 testing for NLDM) that'd serve our 
>campus needs, and leave the one I've got running IPv4 as solely running 
>ingest from y'all.

The good news is that Ethernet cards are so cheap nowadays.  I
have been buying 3Com 3c509x cards for $12 and installing them in the
machines I have been putting together as part of my MeteoForum
activities.

>Have I waved my hands enough, or is it now time to draw a picture?

Got it :-)

Cheers,

Tom
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