20021215: Access to Mcidas files

>From: Earle <address@hidden>
>Organization: University of Saskatchewan
>Keywords: 200212152209.gBFM9w412746 McIDAS-OS2

Hi Earle,

How is retirement treating you?

>It has been a long time since I accessed files on your server and the old
>access (umcidas) doesn't seem to work....

The user name and password have not changed in quite some time, so the
access should work:

machine: ftp.unidata.ucar.edu
user:    umcidas
pass:    XXXXXX

Sometimes FTPs fail when DNS does not have both forward and reverse
name lookup for the user's machine.  We enforce this to keep denial of
service attacks at bay.

What were the synptoms of your FTP failure?

>I am using an old OS/2 system which I do not intend to change (I retired 2
>years ago) and will keep it working as long as possible with the minimum of
>attention...

I see lots of activity from your machine on the ADDE server,
adde.ucar.edu.  I have always marveled that things have worked so well
:-)

>In August the SFCCON and RAOBCON programs stopped working presumably due to
>changes at your end...

What are the symptoms of the failure?  It would be helpful if you could
send in the textual output from a:

DATALOC ADD RTPTSRC ADDE.UCAR.EDU
SFCCON T USA DEV=CCC

The output will tell us what is now failing.  The problem might be
something simple on your end.

>Are there new versions I can download? How do I get at them??

We havn't made a McIDAS-OS2 distribution in several years.  I believe
that you are running the last version that we released.  Now, if the
executables for SFCCON and/or RAOBCON (or PTCON, the program both of
these actually run), somehow went bad (disk problem, for instance),
then we may be able to find replacemnts for you.  First, we have to
understand exactly what is not working, so the output from SFCCON with
the DEV=CCC keyword sequence is crutial.

Cheers,

Tom

>From address@hidden Mon Dec 16 08:42:39 2002
>Subject: Re: 20021215: Access to Mcidas files

I'm really enjoying retirement...My wife & I are doing lots of
travelling--just back a few days ago from 3 weeks in Burma..

The McIdas problem only occurs when the scheduler tries to run SFCCON and
RAOBCON, all other plots (e.g. SFCPLOT, meteorograms, etc) work as
before...When SFCCON is encountered the computer bogs down (resource use
goes up to the ceiling) and no results are produced...No changes have been
made to our system for over a year, but this problem arose in August and I
just got around to looking at it a few days ago...

I'll have to go to the office to send you the data so will do that later
today..