20000720: 20000719: McIDAS-X installation at Western Michigan (cont.)

>From: address@hidden
>Organization: Western Michigan
>Keywords: 200007192151.e6JLp8T03200 LDM installation at Western Michigan

Elen,

>Thank you so much for installing McIDAS-X on s418.  Now I see that the ball is
>at the UCS, witha John Tucker, so I can run a few loops of GOES for my grant.

John told me that he won't be in today or tomorrow, so configuring the
shared memory on s418 will have to wait until Monday.  What this means is
that you will not be able to start a McIDAS-X session with any more than
one frame.  It could probably be bigger than 640x480, but not by much.

I send out the .mcidasrc entries setup to run sessions with 17 640x480
frames; this will fail, but you can work around it.

Assuming that your .mcidasrc file (located in your HOME directory) is
also setup to start a session with 17 frames, you can start a McIDAS-X
session with:

mcidas -f -16

The '-f' flags in the McIDAS startup are added together so that the
implicit '-f 17' in .mcidasrc will be combined with this '-f -16' for
an effective command setting of '-f 1'.  This is how I ran yesterday.

I exercised going out to a couple of ADDE servers in the community and
verified that the installed code on s418 appears to be working
correctly.  From your comment about doing some work on a grant, I am
assuming that you will be working with archived (i.e., not realtime)
data so you should be ready to go once the shared memory limit is taken
care of.

>I think that the idea of creating the backup directory in the ldm account is a
>great one.

I am glad that you agree because this is exactly what I did yesterday
afternoon.  I have basically loaded LDM 5.0.8 in the 'ldm' account and
have almost finished configuring it to begin IDD duties.  I will be
contacting your upstream feed sites and asking them to allow s418 (they
should have allows of s410 from a couple of years ago).  I will also be
contacting SUNY Albany to request a feed of the NLDN lightning data (a
must for teaching).  I don't know if you ever had a feed of WSI radar
data, but I suspect not (this service costs real money, so I can't
imagine that you would have been paying for it for two years while your
system was inactive).

XCD data decoding has been setup so that data files will be put into
the /ilya2/mcidas/data directory.  This file system has about 3 GB of
disk space, so it will be useful for data storage (although it is not
enough to decode all of the gridded data in the IDD, at least not in to
McIDAS GRID format with takes a lot of room).

To get you going, I defined a DATALOCation to the ADDE server we
operate at UCAR for the realtime GINI imagery that comes in the
NOAAPORT broadcast.  You should give this a try:

<login to s418 as 'mcidas'>
start a McIDAS-X session:

mcidas -f -16

verify that you can contact the ADDE server at UCAR:

DSINFO I RTGINI

display some images:

IMGDISP RTGINI/GE1KVIS STA=KDET EU=IMAGE SF=YES REFRESH='EG;MAP H 9'

(I can't remember if KDET is really the station ID for Detroit, so you
may have to change this).

>Because a student was administering the account a couple of years 
>ago, I was afraid I would be deleting some important ldm files.

What I saw did not look important at all.  In fact, some of the stuff
was for playing games.

>I will cleanup the backup file after you sort the account.

OK.  I feel pretty confident that deleting all of the GIF (tm), jpeg
and other images would cause no problems.  I was not sure about the
HTML files or old mail).

>Thank you so much for all your support!

You are welcome.  I am sorry that this didn't get done several months
back, but I have to tell you that I simply forgot about it after
getting frustrated by the lack of disk space and poor (actually
non-existent) network connectivity to s418.  Anyway, alls well that
ends well.

Tom

>From address@hidden Tue Jul 25 12:21:46 2000
>Subject: Re: 20000719: McIDAS-X installation at Western Michigan (cont.)

>Hi Tom,
>Thanks again for installing McIDAS on my workstation s418.
>Unfortunately I cannot even logon to it because if says that there is
>not enough shared memory.  I hope John or Leonard can help because time
>is ticking for my report by the end of this month.

>Thanks,
>Elen

>P.S. To have the McIDAS windows displayed I tried from the mcidas account
>prompt I wrote:

>LOGON flag
>Is this correct?

>From address@hidden Tue Jul 25 12:25:55 2000
>Subject: Re: 20000720: 20000719: McIDAS-X installation at Western Michigan 
>(cont.)

Hi Tom,

re: instructions for starting a session with one frame

>Sorry!  missed this email message. I will try with these instructions
>and let you know if I need more help.

>Thanks again!
>Elen