Thredds uses

Hi,

I have just been looking at the state of the various DODS servers. My 
DODS work has been on hiatus while to cut a long story short "some other 
stuff was happening". I'm back on the wagon now.

Can you answer a simple question for me - Can the Agg server read netCDF 
files from a remote URL and serve them up?

I have a cgi script which will take my crazy MARS requests in a URL, and 
give back a netCDF file. What would be easiest for me would be to build 
a catalog of these using the Aggregation server. I had been working on 
modifying the back end of a DODS server, but it would be a very simple 
solution if I could just point the Agg server at a URL.

When I actually try this, I get some NullPointerExceptions in the log 
file, and the data set does not appear. It could be a bad configuration 
on my part, but I am not so sure. It works fine for the remote data sets 
in the sample configuration file, but obviously they are dods URLS 
rather than actual netCDF files.

I also have has some troubles with some local files that I have, again 
I'm getting runtime exceptions without any real explanation of what's 
going on.

I went looking for THREDDS source code. I think I have a copy of some 
anyway from about 8 months ago when I was tinkering with modifying DODS 
to be able to query my unusual database backend directly, but I would 
prefer to work off current code.

Cheers,
-T