20040120: McIDAS - IRIX 6.5.22 - Since update on January no point data anymore

>From: "Christian =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Pag=E9?=" <address@hidden>
>Organization: UQAM
>Keywords: 200401201502.i0KF2tCK029996 McIDAS-XCD ADDE REDIRECT

Christian,

>Institution: Universite du Quebec a Montreal / Atmospheric Science Group
>Package Version: 2003
>Operating System: IRIX 6.5.22
>Hardware Information: SGI
>Inquiry: Hi,

>I updated my mcidas configuration in January this year to take into account
>new data (satellite). But in doing this, no point data (metar, synop) is
>accessible anymore, and the MDXX files are not updated since.

If all you did was update the LDM ingest/decode and McIDAS ADDE serving
of the data, your decoding of MD files should have not been affected.
What you probably did is somehow wipe out the set of file REDIRECTions
that are needed to tell McIDAS processes (like the XCD decoders for
point data) where the data is to be found/written.

>I find very confusing and hard to pinpoint problems in the whole setup
>of mcidas, so I am again stuck in trying to make this data avaible to
>our students.

If your system was working before, and if you got it to work before
by defining needed file REDIRECTions in a file called ~mcidas/data/LOCAL.NAM,
then you should still have usable values in that file.  If yes, then
you can restore those REDIRECTions by running the following as
'mcidas':

cd ~mcidas/workdata
redirect.k REST LOCAL.NAM

If part of your process was changing where things get decoded, then
you will have to reconfigure XCD decoding from scratch:

1) define needed REDIRECTions by modifying entries in ~mcidas/data/LOCAL.NAM
   to match the new location

2) copy three files to the directory in which files get decoded:

   cp ~mcidas/data/SCHEMA output_directory
   cp ~mcidas/data/SYSKEY.TAB output_directory
   cp ~mcidas/workdata/ROUTE.SYS output_directory

3) define the McIDAS string XCDDATA to the ouput_directory:

   cd ~mcidas/workdata
   te.k XCDDATA \"output_directory

4) configure XCD decoding:

   cd ~mcidas/workdata
   batch.k XCD.BAT
   batch.k XCDDEC.BAT

The above 4 steps setup the McIDAS sited of decoding for all data
except GRID.  Decoding of GRID data is turned off by default in the
Unidata McIDAS distribution.  To turn it on, you run the following as
'mcidas':

cd ~mcidas/workdata
decinfo.k SET DMGRID ACTIVE

Now, since you were changing things to incorporate the new
Unidata-Wisconsin imagery, it is likely that the above XCD setup steps
are not needed.  You may, for instance, have deleted the XCD entries in
your LDM pqact.conf file:

IDS|DDPLUS      .*      PIPE
        xcd_run DDS
HDS     .*      PIPE
        xcd_run HDS

Are the McIDAS-XCD ingesters running (i.e., can you find process IDs
for ingetext.k and possibly ingebin.k)?  If not, then the possibility
of you having deleted the above entries in pqact.conf are high.

Did you make any changes to ~ldm/ldmd.conf?  If yes, did you
delete the line that runs the McIDAS XCD supervisory routine:

exec    "xcd_run MONITOR"

Ordinarily, I would have speculated that you simply have a problem
with the ADDE setup to serve the point data, but you say that no
MD files have been updated since you made the change.  This
implies that files were being updated before that.  Is this
true?

I will be looking at email early tomorrow morning, but I will then
be unavailable until mid day on Friday.  If the above ideas don't
help you get going again, I am willing to login to your machine
to see what happened.  I would need the passwords for 'mcidas'
and 'ldm' if you want me to do this.

>Thanks again,

No worries.

Tom
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