20011112: McIDAS vis-a-via Solaris 7/8 (cont.)

>From: "James R. Frysinger" <address@hidden>
>Organization: College of Charleston
>Keywords: 200111061842.fA6Igt112242 McIDAS platfomrs

Jim,

>McIDAS 7.8 compiled OK, tested sat, and installed without complaints. I 
>also installed the mcadde remote server OK.

Excellent!

>Now I've got to read the 
>stack of pages I printed out for the next stage. I'll give you a few 
>days of peace and quiet while I study those.

:-)

>I can't believe I overlooked the 7.7 link in my path; thanks for 
>catching that as well as my other problems. Yes, we have no vendor 
>compilers. Looking back, I think I must have typed those SUNWxxx paths 
>into there earlier because I saw them in the McIDAS instructions.

Makes sense.

>I didn't realize until your last message that those were related to Sun's 
>compilers. So our installation was done using f2c and gcc and, with 
>your help, it apparently worked fine.

OK, good.  Just out of curiosity, was g77 installed with your gcc
installation?

>In the meantime I've got to sort out a weird problem. I just logged in 
>from home via ssh with no problems except a "set: Syntax error" just 
>below the "no mail", but no commands (ls, cat, and so forth) work. I 
>must have goobered up my path statement in .cshrc. That's probably an 
>easy one to solve by comparison with what we've just gone through.

Something bad in PATH no doubt.

>I'll get back to you after I fix my shell problem and do some reading 
>on the next stage -- especially if I run into another stumbling block!

>From address@hidden Tue Nov 13 07:18:51 2001
>Subject: Fwd: Re: 20011111: McIDAS vis-a-via Solaris 7/8 (cont.)
>
>Tom, I found my typo in my .cshrc file. Alles ist gut.

Wunderbar!

>Working my way 
>through the directions regarding setting up accounts.

The ideas are pretty simple.  Just remember that each user should have
his/her own McIDAS account (keeps people from stepping each other);
each account has its own McIDAS working directory (~user/mcidas/data);
and the user 'mcidas' should be thought of as 'root' for McIDAS
activities (changes made by 'mcidas' can affect all McIDAS users (this
is a good thing)).

>From address@hidden Tue Nov 13 08:42:00 2001
>Subject: Re: 20011111: McIDAS vis-a-via Solaris 7/8 (cont.)

>I've looked over the instructions on "Configuring the mcidas Account" 
>and seem to recall this as being a critical juncture.

Yes, it is.  Again, think of 'mcidas' as 'root' for McIDAS setup.

>A year ago, just before we wiped out our old hard drive, I had McIDAS 
>7.7 up and running -- in a fashion -- and was ingesting data with LDM. 
>At that time, we had very little room on /var so I had created a 
>directory called /export/home/mcdata to replace it. I seem to recall 
>talking to someone by phone on this but that's a dim memory.

It doesn't matter where you put McIDAS data, but I recommend that it
never be in ~mcidas/data.  Creating a directory on a file system
with plenty of disk space is just the ticket.

>Based on a df check, we have about 2 GiB available in / and about 16 
>GiB available in /export/home.

/export/home/mcdata then makes good sense!

>As I recall, we had built data files 
>(1-3 day age limits) that amounted to more than 1 GiB. Our intended 
>usage for McIDAS will be wide-ranging, from teaching general met 
>courses to research on specific topics. We intend to ingest DODS data 
>as well as that from the Unidata datastream and perhaps other sources 
>that might become available. It would make sense to me to again create 
>a mcdata directory under /export/home.

>Do you concur with the above?

Yes, I agree completely.

>If so, once I create an 
>/export/home/mcdata, should I use that to replace /var or /var/data in 
>the LOCAL.NAM file (and others)?

Yes, exactly.

>I guess the question is about the need 
>for a /data subdirectory under this ---/mcdata; would there ever be 
>anything else that should fall under ---/mcdata, such as locally 
>generated user files, etc.?

There may be subrirectories under mcdata, but you don't have to worry
about that now.

>Of course ---/mcdata would be in lowercase 
>to keep it separate from the environmental variable MCDATA.

You can name the directory anything you like, but I would stay away from
directories with upper case names.

>It appears that whatever I do now is something that we are going to 
>have to live with for a very long time, so I thought I had better get 
>your advice on this.

You are doing great!  The only thing I would have warned you to _not_
do was to NOT put XCD and ldm-mcidas data files in ~mcidas/data.
You, however, have already steered clear of that, so I have no warnings
to pass along.

I will want to chat with you about your remote ADDE server setup
at some point.  In particular, I would like to get the machine
name you are installing on and your OK to exercise the remote server
from here at Unidata.  This way I can easily see if everything is
working as it should.

>Thanks,

For some reason we are getting two of each email you send.  Is this
something on your end?

Tom