20010605: DATALOC for datasets of the same name

>From:  Salottolo Greg <address@hidden>
>Organization:  NTSB
>Keywords:  200106051403.f55E3Up28507 McIDAS ADDE DATALOC

Greg,

>Enjoyed meeting with you during the GOES Conference. 

Same here.  To bad we didn't have a little more time to chat.

>Have a question: We would like to access UNIDATA's RTPTSRC and RTGRIDS.
>Since the names are the same as used by SSEC using DATALOC ADD overwrites
>SSEC's Groups. Any way to get around this?

The only way I can think of getting around this would be for met to define
different dataset names for the same set of data files.  I will look into
this later today to see what the ramifications are (they are likely
to be mostly maintenance related).

>In WXTLIST we can use the GROUP=
>to assign a different name to RTWXTEXT and it seems to work.

The real problem is that the association between a group name and the
machine that will serve the entire group is single valued.  This is the
main reason that I split the NOAAPORT GINI images into three different
datasets.  Originally, I had defined a single dataset named RTGINI.
After I located several sites that were willing to serve the GINI data
but did not necessarily have all of the data (some sites have the
GOES-East channel; some have the GOES-West channel; some have both), I
decided to split apart the images into logical sets: EAST, WEST, and
COMPosites.  Now users can "point" (i.e., DATALOC ADD) at different
servers for different portions of the image set.

It would be very nice if the "pointing" could be done on either an
entire dataset or dataset group/descriptor basis.  this would allow for
one to request RTPTSRC/SFCHOURLY from one machine and RTPTSRC/UPPERMAND
from another, etc.  Unfortunately, this is not possible, so we are
stuck with the all or nothing setup currently available.

>Thanks..

Talk to you later...

Tom
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* Tom Yoksas                                             UCAR Unidata Program *
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