20010328: Unidata application installation at Valparaiso (cont.)

>From: Simon Kissler <address@hidden>
>Organization: Valparaiso
>Keywords: 200103231414.f2NEEhL25449 McIDAS-X ADDE

Simon,

>thank you for all this. Sorry about the slow reply. Me & the harddrive on
>my test machine for the client needed to have a conversation about working
>right (in other words i lost the harddrive) which delayed me.

Bummer!

>It seems that most everything is working rather well now. The one thing
>that for some reason I can not access from the client, but can access if
>I'm on the ingestion machine is cross-section data. If I do a Upper Air
>Cross section Menu item for Temperature I get:
>
>String not found: BKGRUN {xsection.gui XSECT T    5
>
>if I run XSECT T 5 from the command line (not that I am sure this should
>work, but seemed worth a try):
>
>XSECT --- BEGIN
>MD file does not exist   17
>XSECT: XSECT --- ABORTED
>
>Any thoughts on this would be appreciated. 

The problem here is that the cross section actions in the version of
the Fkey menu that you have have not been ADDEized.  In order to get
them to work, one still has to do all of the drudge work in setting up
local access to data files (through an NFS mount) and McIDAS
REDIRECTions so that the data files can be found.  This has to be done
in each user's account, but it is not that hard.

To get this to work, you will need to:

o NFS mount the file system containing the McIDAS-XCD and ldm-mcidas created
  data files

o make sure that each user's account is setup to be able to access a copy
  of LOCAL.NAM in the ~mcidas/data directory.  LOCAL.NAM will have had
  to have been setup to locate the various data files on each client
  machine

o from a user's McIDAS-X session, make the REDIRECTions in LOCAL.NAM active:

  REDIRECT REST LOCAL.NAM

The good news in setting up the NFS mount and REDIRECTions is that the
students will be able to use the current version of the Unidata
graphical user interface, MCGUI.  The bad news is that you have to
setup the NFS mounts that you were trying to avoid.

I have been working on, and am almost finished with, a new Fkey menu
that is ADDEized for everything except GRID cross sections (the ADDE
routine for GRID cross sections is too flakey to inflict on folks just
yet).  I have been trying to put together a new addendum with this new
menu for several weeks, but one thing or another has prevented the
release.

Today, I am working on an ADDE dataset selector widget for the Fkey.
As soon as I get this working, I will cut the new addendum and announce
it to the mcidas-x email list.  At this point, you should install the
addendum on each machine running McIDAS and go through the steps that
will be outlined in the addendum update information (I will provide the
URL in the release announcement).

>Thank you for your continued help.

No problem.  Please let me know if I can lend a hand in getting the
direct access to files setup working.

Tom