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20040120: McIDAS 2003: setting up a user account and addendum install

>From: Michael Keables <address@hidden>
>Organization: DU
>Keywords: 200401141924.i0EJO8p2025290 McIDAS upgrade

Mike,

>Thanks for the quick response.

No worries.  I wish I could have been quicker, but...

>Yes, please set up a user account for which I can then duplicate the
>settings for the rest of the students. username is aabley.

OK.  I touched up the setup in the aabley account, but to tell you the
truth, I didn't find much to change there.  Where I did find that changes
were needed was in the 'mcidas' account.  Here is what I did there:

- downloaded the McIDAS addendum that was released in November.  This
  contains some fixes that was causing some of the strange things you
  were mentioning.  In particular, it takes care of the problem in
  correctly generating the .mcidasrc file on first startup.  Now, when
  a user first runs McIDAS, preferentially by:

  mcidas -config

  and selects use of the MCGUI, that option gets written into .mcidasrc.
 
  It didn't dawn on me that some of the strange things you were seeing
  was related to this needed update.  It doesn't address all of your
  concerns (like the number of colors available under VNC), but it does
  take care of a number.

- downloaded the McIDAS BATCH file UPRTE.BAT to your ~mcidas/workdata
  directory and made the additions in it active in your routing table:

  BATCH UPRTE.BAT

- updated your ADDE dataset serving setup in ~mcidas/data/LSSERVE.BAT
  so that the new images that were added to the Unidata-Wisconsin
  datasetream can be served:

  downloaded new copies of DSSERVE.BAT, DSSERVEOLD.BAT, and ADDEIMAGE.CORE
  to your ~mcidas/data directory.  Merged in previous setup information
  in the existing ~mcidas/data/LSSERVE.BAT into a new LSSERVE.BAT that
  includes the new imagery:

  mv LSSERVE.BAT LSSERVE.BAT.bak
  cp DSSERVEOLD.BAT LSSERVE.BAT
  <merge settings from LSSERVE.BAT.bak into the new LSSERVE.BAT>

  Made all of those changes active with:

  cd ~mcidas/workdata
  batch.k LSSERVE.BAT

- updated the existing ~mcidas/data LOCDATA.BAT with the new datasets
  that are accessible through the MCGUI:

  cd ~mcidas/data
  cp DATALOC.BAT LOCDATA.BAT
  <edit LOCDATA.BAT and set pointing to cyclone for the datasets that
   cyclone has; pointed to external ADDE servers for other datsets>
  cd ~mcidas/workdata
  batch.k LOCDATA.BAT

- updated the set of file REDIRECTions needed for v2003:

  cd ~mcidas/data
  cp EXAMPLE.NAM LOCAL.NAM
  <edit LOCAL.NAM to set the directories to match your installation
   (i.e., /data/ldm/mcidas)>
  cd ~mcidas/workdata
  redirect.k REST LOCAL.NAM

- updated the XCD decoding table, ~mcidas/workdata/DECINFO.DAT:

  cd ~mcidas/workdata
  rm DECINFO.DAT
  decinfo.k LIST

  The last step created a new decoding table that matches the v2003
  capabilities.  In practice, this won't do much to your setup, but
  it is wise to keep the decoding table matched with the McIDAS installation.


As the user 'ldm':

- since I installed newly built XCD decoders, I stopped and restarted
  the LDM.  This is a wise thing to do after any McIDAS-XCD update

One thing I noticed in the ~ldm/ldmd.conf file was that you had not
change the request for MCIDAS data to ask for images twice per hour.
You are still getting images once per hour.  Your request does allow
you to get all of the imager channels in the datastream, but not
at the frequence that they are being updated.  You don't have to switc
your setup, but you might want to.

To change the request from once-per-hour to twice-per-hour, change the
ldmd.conf request line from:

request MCIDAS "pnga2area Q[01]" rainbow.al.noaa.gov

to:

request MCIDAS ".*" rainbow.al.noaa.gov

One thing to consider, before making this change:  you are using the
old routing table method for data ingestion.  This setup keeps 10 of
each kind of image received in the UNIWISC (the now official name of
the Unidata-Wisconsin images also known as MCIDAS) stream.  If you
change from getting images once per hour to twice per hour, you will
end up with half the number of hours of images online.  Some don't
think that this is a problem, some do.

If you do decide to modify your UNIWISC request, remember that
after modifing ldmd.conf, you must stop and restart the LDM for
the change to take effect:

<as 'ldm'>
ldmadmin stop
ldmadmin start

>Re: "old GUI", I guess I meant GUI vs. MCGUI (didn't realise both guis were
>available.)

This is most likely due the problems that were fixed in the addendum
that I loaded for you.  Now when you run:

mcidas -config

it is clear that there are two GUIs, the Fkey menu, and nothing that
can be selected.


Back to the setup for the user aabley:

I did the following there:

- removed ~/mcidas/data/MCTABLE.TXT; now aabley gets its dataset pointing
  (DATALOC) information from the file ~mcidas/data/ADDESITE.TXT that
  'mcidas' setup (see the above comments about LOCDATA.BAT).  After
  doing this, I made sure that aabley can access the datasets setup
  by 'mcidas' and the other ones maintained at remote ADDE server
  sites.

- deleted ~aabley/.mcidasrc and remade it from the new template
  included in the addendum:

  <as aabley>
  cd ~
  rm .mcidasrc
  mcidasx

  I loaded and then changed the number of image colors from 64 to 48.
  This should help, if not fix, the VNC problem with numbers of colors.


Well, that's enough for now.  Please let me know if you find anything
strange/not working.

>Thanks!

No worries.

Tom
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