20000208: Changed hostname.

>From: Jim Heimbach <address@hidden>
>Organization: UNCA
>Keywords: 200002082244.PAA24119 McIDAS ADDE DATALOC

Jim,

>     Presently I have two Suns and four LINUX boxes running
>McIDAS-X 7.6. I can display the AREA files on all.  Recently,
>textual, station plots, contouring, topography and some others can
>only be accessed on some machines.  On the server, vortex,
>everything works (Except items requiring GRID-files which is
>onother topic) on the administrative account called mcidas, but
>not so on the user account called uncamcid.  All MDXX files
>appear present and accounted for.

Which routines are you using to display data: ADDE or non-ADDE?

>     For example, attempting to list the hourly METARs for a
>state causes McIDAS to hang requiring an EXIT to be entered.  

What exactly was the command that you ran?

>     The only thing which correlates with the time of our demise
>is the changing of the server's hostname from
>vortex.atms.unca.edu to vortex.  Could this be the culprit?

If you are using ADDE commands, this could be the culprit.  The
host resolution table, typically MCTABLE.TXT for "personal"
data locations and ADDESITE.TXT for system wide data locations,
will contain a mapping between a machines name and IP address.
This might look like:

ADDE_ROUTE_RTIMAGES=ADDE.UNIDATA.UCAR.EDU
HOST_ADDE.UNIDATA.UCAR.EDU=128.117.140.27

The HOST_ADDE.UNIDATA.UCAR.EDU=128.117.140.27 is setup when one
enters a DATALOC command specifying the machine name as in:

DATALOC ADD RTIMAGES ADDE.UNIDATA.UCAR.EDU

A lookup is done to find the IP address for the host and that information
is saved in the ADDE_ROUTE_RTIMAGES=ADDE.UNIDATA.UCAR.EDU line.

What could have happened on your machine is the machine renaming
has caused a disconnect between the fully qualified hostname and
its IP address.  To see if this is true, review your data location
table(s):

SEE MCTABLE.TXT
SEE ADDESITE.TXT

>This
>being the case should I change the file LOCDATA.BAT to have the
>hostname be     vortex     instead of     vortex.atms.unca.edu?

I would first try to rerun the set of DATALOCs contained in your
LOCDATA.BAT file:

BATCH LOCDATA.BAT

This should cause the IP address to be looked up again resulting in
the correct match being setup.  You could try the same sort of thing
for a single dataset by running the DATALOC command from the command
line:

DATALOC ADD RTPTSRC VORTEX

>     On the matter of grid files; I haven't received these for
>some time

I can't remember for sure whether or not you setup XCD decoding of GRID;
did you?  If so, did you do any upgrades to your XCD configuration taht
would result in the XCD GRID data monitor being turned off?

To check the status of the GRID data monitor, do the following:

<login as 'mcidas'>
cd workdata
decfinfo.k LIST

Look for the status of DMGRID.  If it is Inactive, then reactivate it
by running:

decinfo.k SET DMGRID ACTIVE

If no other configurations had been done to destroy the XCD GRID
decoding setup, then GRID files should start being decoded again.  This
assumes, of course, that your LDM's pqact.conf file has the necessary,
uncommented entry for XCD decoding of model data:

HRS     ^.*     PIPE
        xcd_run HRS

If this entry is in pqact.conf, but it is commented out then it is
likely that you never setup the GRID decoding.

If you never setup XCD GRID decoding, then you will need to since the
GRID files that were once in the Unidata-Wisconsin datastream were
removed on July 1, 1999.

>and I fear that I will have to invest a significant
>time to upgrade things, right?.  

Depends on where things stand.  If you never got XCD GRID decoding working,
then there are a few steps that must be taken.  If you did have this
working at one time, then the "fix" should be nothing more than turning
things back on again.  The information on how to setup XCD GRID decoding
is contained in the online manual at:

Building, Installing, and Configuring McIDAS-XCD
http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/packages/mcidas/mcx/mcidas-xcd.html
  Chapter 4 - Decoding GRIB Messages 
  http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/packages/mcidas/mcx/xcd_decgrib.htm

Tom