20000913: upgrade of vortex to latest ldm-mcidas and McIDAS versions

>From: Robert Benites <address@hidden>
>Organization: UNCA
>Keywords: 200009131422.e8DEMgb13709 access information

Bob and Alex,

I got on vortex this morning and installed the latest ldm-mcidas
release under the 'ldm' account and configured the ldmd.conf and
pqact.conf files for the LDM.  As I had anticipated, this part of the
work took only a few minutes, and it appears to have been successful.
vortex is ingesting data and decoding the PNG compressed imagery with
no apparent problems.

While I was on vortex, I took the opportunity to take a look at the
McIDAS-X installation and noted that it had never had any bugfixes
installed.  So, I brought it up to the current bugfix level, 7.613.
This, however, did not take 15 minutes :-(  The problem was that the
previous build of McIDAS on vortex was done with the Sun SC4.2
compilers (good), but the compilers that were accessible with 'cc' and
'f77' were the SC3.0.1 ones.  I quickly saw what someone (Jim?) had
done with regards to the compilation environments and changed the PATH
and LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variables in ~mcidas/.cshrc so that the
newer compilers would be used.  I then rebuilt from scratch McIDAS so
that the code would be in a known state.  This took a long time, but it
proceeded in a window while I did other things.

As a quick list of what was done, I offer:

<as 'ldm'>

o change the ldmd.conf 'request MCIDAS' line to only request the PNG
  compressed imagery

o changed decoding entries in pqact.conf to run the new ldm-mcidas
  PNG decoder, pnga2area

o stopped and restarted the LDM

<as 'mcidas'>

o brought over the latest bug fixes for 7.6 bringing your installation
  on vortex to 7.613

o rebuilt the entire McIDAS-X and McIDAS-XCD distributions from scratch

o added routing table entries for the CIMSS products (Cloud Top Pressure,
  Lifted Index, Sea Surface Temperature, Precipitable Water, CAPE, and
  Ozone) that were added to the Unidata-Wisconsin datastream at the
  end of June

o updated the remote McIDAS ADDE server setup to be able to serve up
  the CIMSS product images

I am under the impression that you have McIDAS-X installed on one or
more Linux boxes at UNCA.  If this is true, then I advise you that
it would be a _very_ good idea to update those installations to the
latest McIDAS bugfix release when you get a chance (sooner is better
than later!).  This is easily done:

<login to the Linux box as 'mcidas'>

cd ~/workdata
cp mcscour.sh mcscour.sh.bak

cd ~/mcidas7.6/update
ftp ftp.unidata.ucar.edu
  <user> umcidas
  <pass> XXXXXX
  cd unix/760/bugfix
  binary
  get mcupdate.tar.Z
  quit
zcat mcupdate.tar.Z | tar xvf -

cd ~/mcidas7.6/src
touch Mcmkmcgrid.c
make all
make install.all

cd ~/workdata
mv mcscour.sh.bak mcscour.sh

This will tide you over till the new McIDAS-X/XCD distribution is ready,
and you have time to install it.

Please let me know if you find anything amiss that are a result of the
modifications I made today.

Tom