19990422: Switch to Linux

>From: "David J. Travis" <address@hidden>
>Organization: University of Wisconsin - Whitewater
>Keywords: 199904222031.OAA25360 OS/2 demise Linux BATCH

Hi David-

>I was wondering since OS/2 is going to be phased out pretty soon is it
>absolutely necessary to switch ALL of our machines that are running mcidas
>to linux or do we just need to make sure the ingesting machine is running
>linux?  As you may remember we are currently ingesting all of the data on
>our linux machine and then forwarding it to a machine for classroom display
>which runs OS/2.  We'd like to leave it this way if possible but I'm
>worried that even the non-ingesting OS/2 machines will have to be phased
>out.  

Your OS/2 box is ingesting data from the Linux box now and this will
be a problem starting July 1.  You are currently receiving the conventional
data (MD) files from the Unidata-Wisconsin datastream on your OS/2 system
instead of decoding the raw data.  We set it up this way to reduce the load
on the OS/2 system.  These MD files will be removed from the U-W datastream
on July 1, so you will not have access to surface and upper air data on
the OS/2 system, unless you start decoding it locally on that system.
Sometime after July 31, the format of the imagery in the U-W datastream
will change also, and at that point, you will not be able to ingest
sat images on the OS/2 system.  Also, you are not running Warp 4.0 so
there is Y2K problem to consider also.  So, I would advise you to
move to Linux on this machine if you still want to have the hallway
display.

>To remind you...the reason we prefer this method is because of the
>automatic loop update batch files that Trent wrote for OS/2.  These are
>very handy for presentation and display and we have had no success
>duplicating these in linux.  

There should be a way to recreate the OS/2 functionality under Linux.
We can help you do this if you want.  We need to know what you want to
do and what trouble you have had trying to do this under Linux.

>Thanks.  Things are going well here...no problems with the data stream.  

Glad to hear it.  Let us know what problems you ran into trying to 
recreate the OS/2 display under Linux and we can help you out.

Don
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Don Murray                               UCAR Unidata Program
address@hidden                        P.O. Box 3000
(303) 497-8628                              Boulder, CO 80307
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