20020909: McIDAS for Arlene Laing's lab

>From: "Happel, Shelly" <address@hidden>
>Organization:  USF
>Keywords:  200209091502.g89F2jj12191 McIDAS MCGUI

Shelly,

re: all but one lab machine are unable to access remote ADDE servers

>Thanks for getting back to me. I am attaching a file called 'fail'. That is
>the info from the keyboard click. Hopefully it says something worthwhile.
>The imgdisp failed rc=2 is what is on the screen.
>
>There were definitely no changes made to the mcidas installation... 

I found the reason that McIDAS on metlab2 doesn't return back useful
information from datasets served from remote ADDE servers.  Presumably,
the reason is the same for all of the other metlab machines (except
metlab1, that is).  What is happening is:

1) the envionment for the user 'rpiddle' defines MCCOMPRESS to be TRUE
   (this is the correct way to specify using compressed data transfers
   from a remote ADDE server).  This will make the remote server compress
   data using 'compress' and the local McIDAS interface to the remote
   server uncompress the data coming from the remote server using
   'uncompress'

2) 'uncompress' does not appear to be installed on metlab2 (and presumably,
   not on metlab3, metlab4, etc.).  At least, a 'which uncompress' on
   metlab1 indicates that 'uncompress' can not be found:

[rpiddle@metlab2 data]$ which uncompress
uncompress: Command not found.

   Now, on metlab1 'uncompress' _is_ found:

[rpiddle@metlab1 ~/mcidas]$ which uncompress
/usr/bin/uncompress

   So, what you need to do is install 'uncompress' on all of the lab
   machines.


While you updating things, I would also either create an ADDSITE.TXT
file in the /home/mcidas/data directory (on metlab) so that all lab
users can share the client routing table information in it, or update
the ~rpiddle/mcidas/data/MCTABLE.TXT file on each lab machine.  I
configured MCTABLE.TXT on metlab2 to be correct/consistent/usable by
the MCGUI and to spread ADDE requests around to several different
servers, so updating all files will be easy.  I recommend, however,
that you copy ~rpiddle/mcidas/data/MCTABLE.TXT to
/home/mcidas/ADDESITE.TXT on metlab and then remove MCTABLE.TXT from
the ~rpiddle/mcidas/data directory on all lab machines.  We can discuss
this strategy at length if you are unclear about the benefits.

Please let me know if you still have problems on the lab machines after
you have installed uncompress on all of them.

Tom

>From address@hidden Tue Sep 10 12:21:34 2002
>Subject: RE: 20020909: McIDAS for Arlene Laing's lab 

Tom! YOU ARE THE BEST!

Whew! I'm not sure why metlab1 had different packages installed.. it's a
mystery. Thank you SO much for figuring this out. It would have taken me
FOREVER to figure out that small factor. I've already updated the
ADDESITE.TXT to the server and we're in the process of removing all of the
MCTABLE.TXT from the individual accts. Thanks again and again and again for
your time :-).

Take care!

Shelly