19990611: pointer file missing in McIDAS

>From: Robert Mullenax <address@hidden>
>Organization: NSBF
>Keywords: 199906111701.LAA21717 McIDAS 

Robert,

>We recently had a data drive fail in our Ultrasparc
>machine(psnldm).

Bummer!

>After getting the machine back and creating
>the directory structures again for /var/data/ldm,
>and copying ROUTE.SYS, SCHEMA, and SYSKEY.TAB from the
>mcidas home directory to /var/data/ldm/mcidas, I get an error
>"pointer file not found on server" when trying to access
>text data.  What is this telling me I am missing.
>The decoding is working fine it seems, and the only
>errors in the log file were when I had the wrong 
>permissions on SYSKEY.TAB.

ROUTE.SYS only has to do with products in the Unidata-Wisconsin
datastream.  SCHEMA and SYSKEY.TAB, on the other hand, are used by both
ldm-mcidas and XCD decoders.  You did the correct thing by restoring
these files to the output data directory.  What you have apparently not
restored is the setup that allows the XCD decoders to update the rapid
access files for textual data.  You need to run:

BATCH XCDSER.BAT

after making sure that the REDIRECTions for the *.RAP, *.RAT, *.IDX
files are correctly pointing to the directory into which the XCD decoders
create their output.  It might be best to stop the LDM, run this BATCH
script, and then restart the LDM to get things going again.

>Right now I have psnldm getting data from the wxmcidas
>ADDE server, which may be the best way to do it anyway,
>but I do need to fix psnldm.

I agree.  It is best to fix the problems while things are fresh.

>Thanks

Later...

Tom