20040128: New FreeBSD 5.2 Servers for McIDAS

>From:  Jim Koermer <address@hidden>
>Organization:  Plymouth State
>Keywords:  200401281424.i0SEOop2018052 McIDAS FreeBSD 5.2

Hi Jim,

>First, thanks with the help in setting up McIdas on storm, one of our 
>new high powered servers.

No worries.  I am always interested to see what happens to builds
of our software on new platforms.

>Ted recalls doing some similar things to what you did with an initial 
>build, but with the either OS change and/or the new McIDAS environmental 
>variables now needed to run McIDAS, I could not get things to work.

Hmm...  We had things pretty much working at the AMS show.  I
wonder what changed?

>At this point, I don't have a pristine FreeBSD 5.x system for you to 
>test.

This is no longer needed.   We put up 5.2 on a machine here at Unidata
right after the show.  Interestingly, the LDM would _not_ build under
5.2 either.  I only tried a simple make and abandonded it when it
failed.  I have to return to the investigation later this week or
somteime next.

>On the other one of our new servers (typhoon), we fell back to 4.9 
>and so far everything seems to be running well--but we can't take full 
>advantage of the capabilities of the machine. The other system (storm) 
>is still at 5.2 as it was while we were in Seattle. It was crashing 
>every few hours until I stopped the LDM. Without that running, it seems 
>to be a bit more stable, but we need to do more testing to see if LDM 
>was part of the problem.

Did you build the LDM on storm?  Like I said above, I did a quick try
on our 5.2 box and had a failure.

>Ted seems to think that the I/O is so fast with 5.2 that it can't keep 
>up with the data flow. This is just a theory at this time. However, our 
>intention is to leave storm as the machine to test new versions of the 
>OS. On typhoon, I just want to get everything running, since my older 
>primary web server machine seems to be having more frequent problems.

Sounds like a good plan.

>You had showed me the colorful global composite map out in Seattle and 
>indicated that I should put that on my server. What do I need to 
>generate one like that?

The composite takes a number of satellite wavelength channels as input
and combines them using McIDAS and a global high resolution topographic
image (for earth/water boundary demarkation).  I should get a test
setup working here so that the processes is canned before you try to
stuggle with it.  If I don't get back to you on this within a month,
please remind me.  Thanks!

Cheers,

Tom
--
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* Tom Yoksas                                             UCAR Unidata Program *
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