19991109: McIDAS Help

>From: Catarino David Delgado <address@hidden>
>Organization: UW-Whitewater
>Keywords: 199911092257.PAA04107 McIDAS-X SYSKEY.TAB

David-

I logged onto your system and tracked down the problem with the
missing SYSKEY.TAB file.  SYSKEY.TAB is the system key table that
is updated by the McIDAS decoders to indicate the latest available
data.  This is normally located in the directory where the data
are being decoded and there is an entry in the REDIRECTion table
for it to point there.

On your system, if you run REDIRECT LIST, you will see the following
entry:

SYSKEY.TAB /var/data/mcidas

which indicates that SYSKEY.TAB should be located in /var/data/mcidas.
However, when I look in that directory on looking-glass, there is
no SYSKEY.TAB (in fact the directory is empty) and that is why you
get the errors when you try to start McGUI.  McGUI (and the F-Key Menu - 
UNIDATA.MNU) relies heavily on an up-to-date SYSKEY.TAB for accessing
data.  

Since there is no data in /var/data/mcidas or /var/data/xcd, I'm not
sure what you are going to try to look at with McGUI.  If you want
to get the GUI started, you could copy the version of SYSKEY.TAB
from /home/mcidas/data to /var/data/mcidas.  However, since this
will not be a copy that is updated by the realtime decoders and
since you don't appear to have any realtime data on the system, 
you won't have access to any data except the TOPOgraphy images
in /home/mcidas/data.  

If your realtime data is stored on another machine, you would need
to mount the data directories on the remote system to /var/data/xcd
and /var/data/mcidas.  If the data are all stored in one directory
on the remote machine, you could just mount /var/data/mcidas, but then
you would need to change all the REDIRECTions in LOCAL.NAM to point
to /var/data/mcidas instead of /var/data/xcd and run 
REDIRECT REST LOCAL.NAM to be able to find the data.

If you plan on decoding the data locally on this system, then you 
will need to copy SYSKEY.TAB and ROUTE.SYS from /home/mcidas/data
to /var/data/mcidas so the decoders will have something to write
to.

If you were planning on using ADDE to access data off mcidas.uww.edu,
you will not be able to do this through the GUI because most of the
options do not use ADDE.  You could use the F-Key Menu which has been
mostly ADDE-ized by running MCMENU UNIDATA.MNU from the command line.
In the near future, Tom will be working to ADDE-ize McGUI and at that
point, the reliance on SYSKEY.TAB will be reduced (if not eliminated).

If you have any questions about the explanation above or how to
proceed next, please let me know.

Don Murray