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20010921: Motherlode & creating RADAR GIFS from ldm



>From: Robert Mullenax <address@hidden>
>Organization: NMSU/NSBF, Universal Weather
>Keywords: 200109181909.f8IJ9T113502 McIDAS Solaris shared memory

Robert,

Sorry I couldn't get to this before now.

>For some reason the reply you sent me about the rebooting of
>motherlode never made it to my hotmail account.  I read
>your reply while persuing the support archives!

Interesting.  Good thing for those archives!

>That's a weird deal you had there.

Yup, it was really weird.  We are seeing some strange things with
the LDM on motherlode right now that we are investigating.  Who knows,
they may all be results of the same cause(s).

>I have heard many good things
>about FreeBSD.  I have also hear that hardware support
>is worse than Solaris and that administering it is
>only a job for the truly experienced.  Is that the case?

Since I am no expert in all things FreeBSD, please accept the following
with a grain (bag?) of salt.  It seems to me that the hardware support
in FreeBSD is better than in Solaris x86 since the FreeBSD folks have
not made a policy statement about their OS only being for server type
machines (like Sun did for Solaris x86).  How on top of things they are
is unknown to me.  This really boils down to the same problem that users
are seeing with Linux: Windows gets support for new hardware first, and
then everyone else follows.

As far as system administration goes, FreeBSD will be a lot more
friendly to old Berkeley Unix hands as it has its origins there.  I
don't think that it is really any harder than Linux administration, but
it is different.

>Now for a McIDAS question.  I would like to create RADAR
>GIFS as the N0R data comes into the LDM, using exec
>from the LDM.  My concern is that there would be many
>McIDAS processes kicked off at the same time and would
>create problems by them stepping on each other.

Even though this is a valid concern, I would be very interested in
seeing if it can work effectively.  If everything works as it is
designed, the process should not step on one another.  If, on the other
hand, something blips, then the processes definitely will step on one
another.  The key is to keep things from bliping :-)

>System
>load should not be too bad as we don't get that many
>radars.

I agree.

>It has been my observation that if I kick
>too many McIDAS scripts off at the same time, I get
>various errors.  I am not sure if it is shared memory
>segement conflicts or what.  Do you have any recommendations
>for creating RADAR GIFS as they come in on the LDM?  

I say to give the LDM kickoff of individual processes a try.  If there
are problems, I want to know about them so I can figure out a way to
avoid them.

>Thanks,

Again, sorry it took so long to get back to you on this.

Tom