19990902: update

>From: Anthony Rockwood - MSCD Meteorology <address@hidden>
>Organization: Metropolitan State College of Denver
>Keywords: 199909021436.IAA16258 platform setup

Hi Tony-

>I'm trying to get caught up here on things.  Classes and students keep us
>pretty busy.

I'll bet!

>McIDAS and GEMPAK are both running, but we still have to get them
>configured so the students can run them out of their accounts.  For now I
>have them do a remote login to wxbox, logon as gempak, run csh, and
>finally ntl.  This works, but I'll have to work on how to get this all to
>work from their own accounts.  It sure is great to have a whole lab full
>of students enthusiastically looking a weather data!  This is what I've
>been waiting for.

It would probably be a lot easier to have Kurt change the user 'gempak'
to use the C-Shell than to keep doing this.  In the long run, it will
make future installations/upgrades easier since all the documentation
is in C-Shell-ese.

If you are going to do this for much longer, you should just create
the wxuser account again and have them run that.  It is very dangerous
to have the students running from the gempak account since they have
permission to change and delete any file in gempak's account.  One
accidental rm could be disasterous!

>Wow, is that N-sharp great !  Is this what Steve Emerson was working on ?
>This is truly fabulous !

This is something that Chiz worked on.  It was originally developed by
one of the guys who wrote SHARP, but Chiz added some enhancements and
fixed a plethora of bugs.

>Regarding your request for input on how to improve the documentation, this
>is something I've been thinking about ever since I tried to do it on my
>own.  The more I tried, the more I realized that the job of creating
>something that would have helped me do it would be huge.  Basically, there
>is so much that a user needs to know to even begin, and you can't create
>documentation that explains every step for every beginning user.  I
>thought that with Kurt knowing the Unix and system administration, and me
>knowing _some_ of the Unidata software, together we could do it.  But we
>couldn't.  And yes, I can tell you where we got stuck.

Again, the time pressure didn't help.  But, you are not alone in having that
constraint though.  I'd really like to hear where you got stuck and
how we can improve the docs to help other sites.

>But this will be a big job, and I have to ask whether it's easier to
>write documentation and installation manuals than it is to do the
>installations yourself as you essentially do now?  Basically, how big a
>job is it for you to continue to support the 'incompetent' sites compared
>to the job of writing the instructions that will allow us to do the job
>ourselves?  If you want to tackle this job, I'll be glad to help.

Any improvement that can be made in the documentation to help other
sites is beneficial to them and us.  In many instances, it is a lot
easier for us to just log on to a system and get things working.  There
are times when someone will miss just one step in the installation process
and trying to figure that out through a series of e-mails is painful.
If you have the time to point out specific deficiencies in the
documentation, let us know.  I've already pointed out some things
to Tom and Chiz about the McIDAS and GEMPAK docs, but then again,
I (supposedly) know what I'm doing.  For someone who is not familiar
with Unix and/or our packages, there may be things that I take for
granted, but are confusing to these users.

>I still have the laptop to configure, so when I get a chance, I'll need to
>ask you a bunch of questions about that.

Okay.  Use RH 5.2, not 6.0 on the laptop.  We are having problems getting
GEMPAK to compile under 6.0 and have not tried McIDAS yet.

>Gotta get to class - more later

Later..

Don