20030617: NLDN web display at USF (cont.)

>From: "Happel, Shelly" <address@hidden>
>Organization: USF
>Keywords: 200306121710.h5CHA3Ld017681 McIDAS NLDNDISP web pages

Shelly,

>Thanks for the speedy reply.

No worries.

>First off, coming to Boulder is something I'm
>definitely looking forward to!

Well, that's a relief!  I was beginning to worry about you :-)

>If nothing else than to just personally say
>thank you to you for all of your patience and support :-) I really am
>grateful to you for helping us over here.

No problem...

>The issue in the lab was that Arlene couldn't get mcidas to come up with
>anything. No lightning data (it really went crazy here yesterday with
>lightning and rain), no radar data.

Hmm...  Was she logged on as 'mcidas', or as herself?

>The issue with the LDM is that I don't have all of our data coming. I get
>bogged down by infinite questions like - which packages have radiosonde and
>surface data? If I want nexrad - how many of those parameters do I want to
>request and for which stations and then how do I phrase that in the cryptic
>regular expressions... these kinds of things. I did a notifyme request from
>the unidata website to see if our upstream site was getting the nextrad
>feeds and it said it couldn't find anything. (notifyme -v -l- -h
>pluto.met.fsu.edu -f NMC3 -o 3600 & notifyme -v -l- -h pluto.met.fsu.edu -f
>NEXRAD -o 3600) were the two commands I used.

FSU does have the NNEXRAD data; they are getting it from U Oklahoma.
The fact that you couldn't see them having NNEXRAD data is most likely
due to their not allowing metlab.cas.usf.edu to access the data.
In this case, you should send an email to the LDM contact at FSU:

Bill Cottrill <address@hidden>
              <address@hidden>

and/or

Bret Whissel <address@hidden>

and request that they change their allow line for you from what it
is now to:

allow   ANY-NLDN-WSI    metlab.cas.usf.edu

>Only the lightning data has restricted IP address and that's only through
>the apache webserver.

OK.

>That should not have affected what you were trying to
>do.

Something was.  I wonder if this is related to the problem that Arlene
was having.

>I went to our lightning page and it still only shows the background map
>and not the actual lightning data :-(.

OK.

>One thing I will do is disable the
>restricted access to the lightning page so you should be able to now see
>what we're seeing when you go to
>http://metlab.cas.usf.edu/cgi-bin/gen_mcidas_lightning.cgi.

Yes, I see that it is blank (except for the map).

>Thanks again Tom - you are truly the best!

Here is what I have done:

- create a test script in /usr/local/apps/php-apache/htdocs/sridhara/mcidas/bin
  called test_lighting.  I used this script to find out what was missing.
  What was missing was the definitions of where the data files are
  located.  The previous thing I did was to create the file that defined
  the relationship between the ADDE dataset names and the files that
  compose them, but I forgot to create the file, LWPATH.NAM, that tells
  McIDAS where the files are actually located.

After creating /usr/local/apps/php-apache/htdocs/sridhara/mcidas/LWPATH.NAM
the plots of surface maps, etc. from the USF web page now work,and
my lightning plotting test script started working.

What wasn't working was the the lightning plotting link on your web page!?

I then mucked around with mk_lightning (I had to kill someone else's vi
of that file (you?) in order to be sure that my changes would not be
overwritten).  I removed the logging output since access to the data is
now working and ran the lightning plotting from the web page.

I kept getting blank displays from the web which was totally
frustrating.  To see if mk_lightning was really failing to create a
lightning display, I set DISPLAY to my machine here at the UPC and used
xview to display the GIF (tm) file being saved by the frmsave.k
invocation in mk_lightning .  This display shows that the plotting _is_
working correctly.

Now the question is why the display in web page is not correct?

Tom