20040108: McIDAS and LDM installations at St. Cloud State

>From: "Anderson, Alan C. " <address@hidden>
>Organization: St. Cloud State
>Keywords: 200401082149.i08Ln1p2002455 McIDAS ADDE LDM ldm-mcidas

Hi Alan,

>My campus network guy said he would have the two terminals
>open to telnet and ssh within a few minutes.  Regarding the
>info I gave you over the phone, for waldo, the number goes
>in front, not at the end.

Got it, thanks.  I logged on and did a few things.  More below.

>From address@hidden Thu Jan  8 15:19:12 2004

>I suspect our email's may cross, if not, our thoughts.   Since I
>spoke with you, some things have changed, apparently for the better.

This is always good news :-)

>First, it was good to hear your voice; also  it allowed me to update
>the ip and pw info to you.

Good to chat with you as well even if it was only for a coule of minutes.

>On the terminals, while setting up access for you, I could not find
>an inetd process running on waldo so suspect that might be the
>problem.

inetd not running would certainly prevent ADDE from working.  The
ADDE processing is started by inetd on the server side upon receipt
of a request from a client.

>Stopped the ldm, rebooted, restarted the ldm, all seemed
>to go ok.

You could have started inetd by hand as 'root', but rebooting was
probably a good idea anyhow.

>Now, the terminal on which mcidas would not run properly seems to
>work ok.  I can display an image with no problem.

Sounds good.  While on waldo, I took the opportunity to setup decoding
and ADDE serving of the new imager that was added to the Unidata-Wisconsin
(IDD UNIWISC aka MCIDAS) datastream.  I will stay logged on until some
of the new images come across to make sure that I didn't mess anything
up.

>As a separate issue, when starting mcidas on this machine,  I got a
>message that said it needed to use a private color map as not enough
>colors were available. I have never seen that before, except when a
>browser session was running at the same time. There were no browser
>sessions running in this case. I edited the .mcidasrc file and
>uncommented the lines near the bottom which give color numbers.
>Restarted mcidas and things went ok.

Hmm...  If you havn't see this before, it is odd that you would start
seeing it.  I can tell you that newer version of McIDAS use more colors
than older versions.  Is it possible that your new machine, cumulus,
has a 24-bit video card so that you can run your X sessions with more
colors?  McIDAS has supported 24-bit displays for years, and GEMPAK
has supported them since some time last year, so it would be wise
to change your X setup if you do have a 24-bit card.

>So, I guess I should have checked waldo more completely before calling,

No worries.  It gave me the opportunity to get the new imagery decoding
up for you.

>but when I was able to create products on the terminals running the older
>version of mcidas,  I assumed waldo was ok  and that the problem was with
>our setup and configuration on the machine running mcidas2003.   Also,
>waldo's ldm seemed to be running ok (no error msg in log file) so I did
>not suspect any problem.

The LDM does not use inetd, so it would keep on running with no errors.
McIDAS ADDE needs inetd on the server side, so it dying would stop
things from working.  I also found an extraneous entry in the
/etc/services file for ftp even though there was already one.  The
second entry used spaces instead of tabs.  I am not sure if this would
be a problem, but I deleted it anyway since the file already had
the needed entry near the beginning.

>One more item.  We are upgrading our OS to Solaris 9, which includes
>ssh. Can I use ssh on one of these to send you info, things like pwds or
>IP or is regular mail or a short phone call the easiest way to keep these
>things secure? I run all my regular email on a pc with windows.

A phone call is the most secure way to keep this information secret.
The other thing I ask sites to do is send the passwords for accounts
to my private email _without_ mentioning the machine or user names
that they are associated with.  This seems to have worked OK for the
past few years, but a phone call is still safer.

By the way, I had to SSH to cumulus using its IP address.  I had to
then telnet to waldo from cumulus.  Hopefully, your comment about
upgrading to Solaris 9 and using ssh pertains to waldo as well as
your other machines.

OK, I just saw the new GOES-West 3.9 um and 12.0 um images come in
and get decoded correctly.  I then verified that I can look at them
from cumulus using ADDE from waldo.  I will, therefore, assume that
things are working as they should.

The last thing I did was to copy the file ADDEIMAGE.CORE down
to the ~mcidas/mcidas2003/data directory.  This file setups up the
display defaults for various images.  The new version has entries
for the new products in the Unidata-Wisconsin datastream.  The
next time you start a McIDAS session on cumulus, your MCGUI will
have the defaults setup in the new ADDEIMAGE.CORE.

>Thanks Tom

No worries.

Cheers,

Tom