20011120: McIDAS vis-a-via Solaris 7/8 (cont.)

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

Jim,

>       Wow! How many Saturdays am I supposed to come over and wash your car? 

Hmm...  Now that is a new one worthy of consideration.  Mostly we get
the promise of a beer sometime in the future :-)

>The amazing thing is that it probably would have taken me at least a 
>week to figure out all that you did, even with your help, and fix it 
>myself.

I don't think so.  The only thing that I did that was not in the
instructions was create the grib and bufr subfirectories of
/export/home/mcdata.  This is an item that I will have to address
documentationwise.

>Hmmmm. Maybe that's why you did all that work for me, eh?  I 
>really appreciate it.

I have this compulsion to fix things.  Since this includes working
around the house, it is one of the main reasons that I bought a 1902
Victorian some years back.  If you are into working on houses, you will
already understand that those kinds of houses ned constant TLC.  I have
been going through a withdrawal lately since I sold that house at the
end of August.  I guess I will just have to go out and buy a vintage MG
or Triumph since those cars also need constant tinkering.  But,
what does this have to do with installing and configuring McIDAS!?

>       Now, I've got to match this up with the directions so I can see just 
>where I am and how what you did related to those directions; that way 
>I'll be a little wiser the next time round.

I think that the directions are pretty much of an ABC.  It has become
apparent, however, that I really need to have an ABC page where the
explanations for why things are done are links that one can bore down
into or not based on the interest/time level.  Any ideas?

>But in the meantime, I'll 
>keep the ball moving. I can always study while the data's flowing in. 
>Your play-by-play will be most helpful there.

Right.  Since you are very close, and since the final steps in
XCD installation and configuration were so simple, I figured that
my doing them would help prevent frustration from setting in.

Like I said before, after you understand the installation procedure,
the job proceeds rapidly.  The most time I spent yesterday was in
composing the email that explained what I did and why I did it.

>       Just a comment or two below....

OK.

>> DATALOC ADD TOPO      TOPO
>>
>> when you wanted:
>>
>> DATALOC ADD TOPO      LOCAL-DATA
>
>       Yeah, that's about my speed some days. Yoiks.

No worries.  This stuff really does look like Greek until you understand
what is going on.

re: shared memory

>       Hmmm. So why doesn't it show up on 'top'?

Most likely because shared memory is loaded on demand.  Before runing
the sysdef command, I had occasion to run a couple of McIDAS commands.
These would have forced the OS to load the shared memory subsystem.
I can't explain the non-listing in 'top', however.

>Ditto on my linux system. 

I _really_ don't understand this one.  My system has always shown
available shared memory.  The good news on Linux is that the default
amount of shared memory is sufficient for small to medium McIDAS
sessions (a large session would be like what is used in RAMSDIS:
256 frames).

>And on my linux it doesn't show up on 'free' either. As I recall, I 
>tried 'free' on Solaris but it doesn't do that. I think I dug up the 
>Solaris equivalent instruction and it also said 0K shared memory. That 
>is the instruction page I used in both cases.

I will have to check into free; I have never used it.

re: 'make install' vs 'make install.all'

>       That's one area I'll want to go back to see how I misread the 
>directions so I don't do it again, hopefully.

The idea here is that XCD only has to be built on the machine that
is running the LDM (and remote ADDE server).  All other machines
only need McIDAS-X (all can share binaries if they are all the
same kind of machine/OS, but a number of sites have labs with a
mixture of Unix (Sun, SGI, IBM, DEC, etc.) and Linux (mostly RedHat).
In that setup, you can't share binaries.

>       Roger, will do the stuff below tomorrow morning when I'm more awake; 

Good plan.

>the bin/false is a new one on me, by the way .....

This was one my system administrator clued me into.

>Once again, yottathanks! You've saved me a *lot* of work!

No problem.

The LDM setup should go smoothly, but I am sure that threr is one area
related to McIDAS that will warrant explanation.  I will jump in when
you get to that point.

Tom