Announce: TDS stable release 3.6

A new stable release of the THREDDS Data Server 3.6 is now ready at

 ftp://ftp.unidata.ucar.edu/pub/thredds/3.6/thredds.war

The main reason for this release is to release a stable version of the catalog 
schema (version 1.0.1), which is now frozen.

There were a number of minor changes to the catalog schema (eg "dirLocation" is now 
"location" in several places), as well as new functionality added to the DatasetScan 
element.  We encourage you to make your catalogs validate against this schema, which will eliminate 
various possible errors in configuring the TDS.  The TDS will still accept the older catalogs 
without validation.

You can run validation externally through your favorite XML editor (I am using 
Oxygen). TDS will also show you the validation errors. If you use Tomcat 5.0.X, 
you are encouraged to upgrade Tomcat's XML parser to Xerces 2.7.1, which has 
improved validation messages. Unfortunately you have to do this yourself, see:

 http://motherlode.ucar.edu:9080/thredds/docs/GettingStarted.html#validation

Various bugs have also been fixed. A particular one to note is a bug that 
usually prevents the Tomcat server process from exiting correctly. If you are 
running TDS 3.4 or above, you should do the following

 1) if you use deployment, deploy the new thredds.jar, version 3.6 first.
 2) shutdown Tomcat (${tomcat_home}/bin/shutdown.sh)
 3) look in your process log for zombie tomcat server process (eg ps -elf | 
grep java)
 4) kill any zombie tomcat server processes
 5) if you copy thredds.jar into webapps manually, now's the time to do that
 6) startup Tomcat (remember you should become the tomcat user to do this) 
(${tomcat_home}/bin/startup.sh)

The new version of thredds does not have this problem, so you should no longer 
have problems stopping and restarting tomcat.

In summary:
 1. Please upgrade your TDS to version 3.6. Sorry about the zombies ;^{
 2. Please validate your TDS catalogs, it makes our job supporting TDS easier!
 3. Most excellent new DatasetScan functionality:
     http://motherlode.ucar.edu:9080/thredds/docs/datasetScan/index.html

We will be moving the motherlode:8080 server to version 3.6 in the next day or 
two.

Thanks!