20040129: New FreeBSD 5.2 Servers for McIDAS

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

Hi Jim,

re: McIDAS under FreeBSD 5.2 was working at the AMS
>Not to worry--Ted had done the build prior to the AMS meeting, so your 
>installation is what's on there and is what we now have working.

OK.  I will be addressing the differences in FreeBSD 5.2 in the
next few days.  Like I said in the previous email, my attempts
to build LDM also fail on our new FreeBSD 5.2 system.

>I'm copying Ted here, who did the LDM build. I don't recall any problems 
>with the build, but he should know for sure.

After looking at this in more detail, I don't know how the LDM could
have built on your FreeBSD 5.2 machine.  I found that the definition of
a structure used by the LDM is significantly different between FreeBSD
4.9 and 5.2.  Other systems like Solaris, HP-UX, and Linux have the
structure defined to support two different names for an element (xp_fd
and xp_sock), so either works.  FreeBSD 4.9 defines xp_sock and FreeBSD
5.2 defines xp_fd.  The LDM uses xp_sock, so the compilation fails
under 5.2.

>However, I'm beginning to 
>become more convinced that LDM could possibly be the source of our 
>crashing problem. Since Ted turned it off, the 5.2 machine has been 
>stable, where it had been crashing after only a few hours when LDM was 
>running.

I would say that the LDM might be stressing your machine to
the point of making it crash.  I would be suprised if it were making
it crash directly.  There is a difference in the two views...

re: LDM on storm (FreeBSD 5.2)
>As I inicated earlier, it built. When it was running, I was getting data.

OK.  Was your machine upgraded from a previous FreeBSD release to
5.2, or was it a pristine installation?  Our test machine was a
pristine install, not an upgrade.

Along these lines, I see that the version of gcc is 3.3.3.  This
is the first box that we have tried building on that is running this
release of gcc.

re: NDVI, water vapor, and SST composite images; I will try to get this
working and "can" the procedure

>I'll be looking forward to it.

>BTW, in Seattle, Tom Whittaker convinced me to try is Java Animation 
>Applet, AniS, and I did. I noted one minor glitch with button labelling 
>and suggested a new feature. Sure enough in a matter of hours, Tom fixed 
>the minor problem and added my desired feature (to keep part of an image 
>with date/time and/or legend information from being zoomed) and I've 
>implemented it on all my JAVA animations--it works great and after an 
>initial download using this Applet, additional JAVA animations load 
>extremely fast compared to the old Javascript Applet that I had been 
>using. Additionally, you have the zoom and other capabilities.

Tom's applet is used everywhere!

I am glad that you are using his applet since the composites I noted
above are created as JPEG files, not as McIDAS AREAs.

Cheers,

Tom
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>From address@hidden Thu Jan 29 13:45:02 2004

On Thursday 29 January 2004 03:20 pm, Unidata Support wrote:
re:
> >I'm copying Ted here, who did the LDM build. I don't recall any problems
> >with the build, but he should know for sure.
>

When I built it I had made an IFDEF for FreeBSD that took that into account.  
As far as the crash goes...  It is not directly attributable to LDM.   It may 
be attributeable to the many things that were happening in addition to LDM, 
which was the real cause if the crash.  V5.2 of FreeBSD is still an early 
adopters release designed to help find the bugs.   There is a problem related 
to the speed of the system and heavy I/O that causes crashes.   I have found 
that 5.2 works very well on older slower hardware; 5.3 is supposed to be the 
"production" release which should be out in June.

Ted