20010830: 20010825: McIDAS-X 7.80 build on FreeBSD 4.3 (cont.)

>From: Jim Koermer <address@hidden>
>Organization: Plymouth State College
>Keywords:  200108251422.f7PEMS127324 McIDAS-X 7.8 FreeBSD g77

Jim,

re: we need to chat a bit more about your plans for PSCWX

>Our plan for PSCWX is to use it as our primary network machine and
>server.
>
>This means that we want it to be the network ingestor of data from our
>NOAAPORT machines. As you know, I have been using NFS to mount the
>NOAAPORT drives on my other machines. However, with the expansion of
>NIDS data and model data in the future. I simply won't have the space
>on those systems to keep data around. Currently, on one system that I
>have totally dedicated to NIDS, I can only store a little more than two
>hours of data at a time.  With 13 additional nids products coming that
>could be paired down to only 30 minutes or so. I also can't keep more
>than about two model runs on the NWSTG system at a time--sometimes not
>even that.

OK, I understand.

>As a result, I want to move much of the NOAAPORT data over to PSCWX
>with a large RAID system via LDM. LDM is working beautifully now on
>PSCWX and I'm currently pqing the nids data from a NOAAPORT machine. I
>can easily expand the product list, since Dan Vietor set up a very user
>friendly interface for sending products for ingest on our other systems
>through pqing. If you could send me the basic header wild cards that
>you need for XCD, I can turn this on very quickly.

Hmm...  The basic division in products as far as XCD goes is that
all textual products need to get sent to one ingester and all binary
products need to get sent to another.  This would mean that you would
need to tag all of the textual bulletins as being one feed and
all of the model output as a different feed.  As far as a specific
list of product headers, this is beyond my knowledge.  Perhaps Dan has
already cracked this side of the problem?

>I'm not sure at this time that I want to use it to ingest McIDAS data
>from LDM upstream sites or pass data to downstream LDM sites. I first
>want to see what the performance will be with this large volume of data
>ingest from one or more NOAAPORT channels (NWSTG, GOES-E, and GOES-W).

Just for information sake, we run a dual 550 Mhz PIII system to ingest
all 4 NOAAPORT channels and feed the LDM machine sitting in the main
machine room at NCAR (motherlode).  We are not, however, running
data decoders or web servers on this machine.

>Our other intentions for this machine are for it to be our primary web
>server including the one for all of our "Make Your Own..." pages. We
>may do the pre-built web graphics on one of our other machines, but may
>also move that production over to this machine.

I am getting the picture of the load that this machine will experience.

>We also want it to be the primary ADDE server. We want it to be our
>McIDAS server for using McIDAS-X via XWin32 from machines in our PC
>clusters, as we have in the past, and perhaps playing a similar role
>for GEMPAK.

Phew.  This machine could be extremely loaded!

>In any event, we will not be using the console to display an
>application.

Makes sense.

>I hope this gives you an idea on our intentions. Let me know if you
>have any questions.

Yes, it does give me a better picture of what you will have this machine
doing.  What I need to learn more about is how the Unisys NOAAPORT system
can be interfaced with the LDM.  I am guessing that I might need to talk
to Dan about this directly.  Several of us were chatting about this
a couple of minutes ago, and we were under the impression that Unisys
has already setup _something_ that allows their system to work with
the LDM.  This may, in fact, be the interface that allows one to pqing
products into an LDM queue, or it might be quite a bit more elaborate.
This is what I have to find out from Dan (unless you know the answers
already).

Thanks for the valuable input.  Talk to you later...

Tom
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