19990709: wxnut setup on halo

>From: Zuo Dong Zheng <address@hidden>
>Organization: CCNY
>Keywords: 199907011430.IAA14251 McIDAS make IRIX compilers

Zuodong and Ward,

I decided to login to halo to poke around and make sure that things
are running correctly.  In doing so, I had the occasion to check out
how the wxnut account was setup to run McIDAS-X.  What I found raised
red flags that I feel obligated to share.

McIDAS is designed to be run from individual accounts where each users
has his/her own McIDAS working directory.  This working directory is
identified through the user's MCDATA environment variable.  For
all users other than 'mcidas', this should be set to the mcidas/data
subdirectory of the user's home directory.  For instance, if the
home of wxnut is:

/home/wxnut

then MCDATA for 'wxnut' should be:

/home/wxnut/mcidas/data

The user 'mcidas' is different.  The MCDATA definition for 'mcidas' is:

/mcidas/workdata

The user 'mcidas' should be thought of as the McIDAS equivalent to
'root':  McIDAS sessions should only be run out of this account for
supervisory purposes!!!!  I can't stress this strongly enough!

What I see on halo is: MCDATA for wxnut is defined as /mcidas/workdata.
This is incorrect and must be changed.  This is important.

I took a quick look at more /var/eas/Login.Environment (which is
sourced by wxnut's .login) and see:

# Mcidas Settings
setenv McINST_ROOT /mcidas
# setenv MCDATA ~`whoami`/mcidas/data
setenv MCDATA /mcidas/workdata
# setenv MCPATH ${MCDATA}:/mcidas/mcidas7.1/data:/mcidas/mcidas/help
setenv MCPATH /mcidas/workdata:/mcidas/mcidas7.1/data:/mcidas/mcidas7.1/src
setenv MCGUI /mcidas/mcidas7.1/bin:/mcidas/mcidas/bin

You can see from this listing that MCDATA _used_ to be defined correctly
for wxnut: 'setenv MCDATA ~`whoami`/mcidas/data', but it was changed to
be 'setenv MCDATA /mcidas/workdata'.

MCPATH for wxnut is also incorrect.  It should be set to:

setenv MCPATH ${MCDATA}:/mcidas/data:/mcidas/help

MCGUI for wxnut is also incorrect; it should be:

setenv MCGUI /mcidas/bin

Now, onto the contents of /home/wxnut/mcidas/data.  The newer releases
of McIDAS have gotten to the point where there needs to be very few
user-specific files in his/her McIDAS working directory.  The files
that are needed can be copied there by the user by running the
McIDAS administrative script 'userdata' which is contained in the
McIDAS installation admin directory (/mcidas/admin on your system).
The syntax for running 'userdata' is:

/mcidas/admin/userdata /mcidas/mcidas7.5/data /home/wxnut/mcidas/data

This would work on your system except for the renaming of /mcidas/mcidas7.5
to /mcidas/mcidas7.1 that Zuodong did (I still havn't figured that one
out yet, but I am betting it had something to do with the environment
setup for wxnut).

So, I recommend that the following be done:

o change /var/eas/Login.Environment so that MCDATA, MCPATH, and MCGUI
  are correct for users other than 'mcidas'.  While at it, remove
  McINST_ROOT from it as well since the average user does not need
  to be concerned with the installation of McIDAS.

o login as wxnut

o EXIT the McIDAS session that wxnut is running

o cd /home/wxnut/mcidas/data
  rm *

  This will remove the copies of all of the files that only need to exist
  in the /mcidas/data directory.  This should save you some disk space.

  Next, run:

  /mcidas/admin/userdata /mcidas/mcidas7.1/data /home/wxnut/mcidas/data

  This will copy four files from /mcidas/mcidas7.1/data to
  /home/wxnut/mcidas/data (remember, it really should be /mcidas/mcidas7.5/data
  instead of /mcidas/mcidas7.1/data).

After doing these steps, it would be best to have all wxnut logins exit.
After that, one wxnut session can be safely started and McIDAS-X run
from it.  I strongly recommend against running multiple McIDAS sessions from
a single account especially when they are run from different machines.
Ward will learn all about this when he comes to the McIDAS workshop
at the beginning of August.

Sorry I didn't see this yesterday.


Tom