20010926: which McIDAS version executables the ADDE remote server will use

>From: Unidata User Support <address@hidden>
>Organization: Unidata Program Center/UCAR
>Keywords: 200109261738.f8QHc7117319 McIDAS-X ADDE

Jim,

This note is a follow-up to the phone conversation we had yesterday.
It is also influenced by an email exchange we had with Tom Whittaker
who, in turn, had an email exchange with Dave Santek and Rick Kohrs.

Here goes:

The ADDE server routine 'mcserv' prepends three directories onto any
PATH that may be in place.  The three directories are:

~<user>/bin
~<user>/mcidas/bin
~mcidas/bin

Here <user> is whatever user is running the server stuff:

o for the case of the remote server, in most cases (including yours and
  ours), this is 'mcadde'

o for local services (datasets being declared as LOCAL-DATA),
  this is the user running the McIDAS command(s)

The bottom line is that you _could_ have forced the ADDE remote
server on suomi to use the 7.801 distribution binaries by making the link
you were about to make when I _incorrectly_ told you that it wouldn't
work.  I.e., in order to use the 7.801 executables, you could do
the following:

<login as 'mcadde'>
cd
ln -s /goes3/mcidas/newmcidas/bin bin         (if ~mcadde/bin doesn't exist)

or

cd mcidas
rmdir bin                                     (this was empty on your system)
ln -s /goes3/mcidas/newmcidas/bin bin

I apologize for steering you wrong on the effect of making the link.

I want to restate, however, that the setup for the ADDE remote server
is still misleading.  The reason for this is that the copy of mcservsh
that will get used by the /etc/inetd.conf setup will determine (through
its definition of McINST_ROOT) the copy of mcserv that will get
executed.  mcserv will then do the prepending to PATH that will allow
for use of the link you make above.  On your system, this would result
in the 7.7 version of mcservsh and mcserv being used while the rest of
the executables would be from 7.801.  To me, this is still unexpected.
The good news, however, is that neither mcservsh nor mcserv have
changed in the past few McIDAS distributions.

Tom