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20010202: McIDAS looping failure on AIX 4.2 (cont.)

>From: Unidata Support <address@hidden>
>Organization: SMSU
>Keywords: 200102022043.f12Kh4X20431 McIDAS loop

Bill,

I had a chance of getting back on cirrus this afternoon to again look at
your looping problem.  Previously, I noted that I believed that I could
see what was happening, but I didn't know why it was happening:

>>I don't know why MCPATH is not being defined correctly, but it is
>>resulting in FRAMENH.001 always getting created in ~mcidas/workdata
>>and presumably for the loop control system not finding TERMCHAR.001
>>(which causes the 'cannot locate' error message above).

I was correct in my assumption that McIDAS sessions were not finding
TERMCHAR.001 in a subdirectory of ~mcidas/.mctmp.  I still don't know
why this is the case, but I suspect that it has something to do with
the way McIDAS-X was built (special, additional libraries needed since
you are still at AIX 4.2).

Given that you noted that you would be setting up a new Linux machine
in the near (?) future, I decided that it might not be a real good
investment in time to find out what exactly was going wrong.  Instead,
I decided to figure out how to work around the problem, and here
is what I came up with:

I copied a version of TERMCHAR.001 that was created in a ~/.mctmp
subdirectory to ~mcidas/workdata.  TERMCHAR.001 contains terminal
characteristics so this might be a bad thing if the McIDAS account were
to be used from differing display heads/OSes.  I don't believe that you
are in this situation, so I am hoping that it will not impact you.

If you do run into problems, then I suggest that you:

o EXIT your McIDAS-X session
o cd ~mcidas/workdata
  rm TERMCHAR.001
o start a McIDAS-X session
o cp ~/.mctmp/whatever_dir_was_created/TERMCHAR.001 .
o EXIT your McIDAS-X session
o start a McIDAS-X session

This sequence will insure that the copy of TERMCHAR.001 that you will
use is matched to your display.

After cleaning out the FrameN.M files from /home/mcidas/help, I am now
able to run a McIDAS-X session on cirrus with display back to my machine
here at the UPC and display and loop a sequence of images.  Here is
what I did to test this:

DATALOC DEL NEXRAD                 <- incorrect dataset for NOAAPORT Level III
                                      products
DATALOC ADD RTNEXRAD ADDE.UCAR.EDU <- correct dataset for NOAAPORT Level III
                                      products

IMGDISP RTNEXRAD/N0R ID=BRO STA=BRO EU=BREF ALL=1 4 SF=YES REFRESH='EG 
(GRA);MAP H GRA=(GRA)'
LB 1 4
DR 3*5 20
L

The images were loaded correctly, and the looping proceeded with no problems.

Again, the reason that looping was not working was that TERMCHAR.001
was not being found/read.  Forcing it to exist in the ~mcidas/workdata
directory made things work, but should have been unnecessary with a
"clean" installation.

While I was on your machine I made a couple of other changes:

o I noticed that you had a copy of LWPATH.NAM in ~mcidas/data.  This
  file is designed to be created/used in each user's $MCDATA directory,
  so I took the liberty of renaming it:

  cd ~mcidas/data
  mv LWPATH.NAM LWPATH.bak

  If other McIDAS-X users were using this version of LWPATH.NAM, they
  no longer will be able to.  This is how it should be, so I hope
  you don't change things back.

o I edited ~/.kshrc and added definition of MCCOMPRESS; this will
  request compressed data transfers from ADDE servers.  The previous
  setup requested uncompressed transfers, so displays should now be
  significantly faster

o I noticed that you are running 7.700.  I took the liberty of upgrading
  you to the most recently released McIDAS-X addendum, 7.704 (although
  I am working on the next addendum right now):

  cd ~mcidas/mcidas7.7/update
  ftp ftp.unidata.ucar.edu
     <user>
     <pass>
     cd unix/770/bugfix
     binary
     get mcupdate.tar.Z
     quit
  ./mcupdate
  cd ../src
  make mcx

  ** in order to get link to work, I had to edit ~/mcidas7.7/src/makefile
     and add -lXextSam after -lXext as a library to search.
     Do you recall if this was the same thing that you had to do to get
     the link to work on AIX 4.2?
  **

  make install.mcx

o Since you are no longer running XCD, I took the liberty of uninstalling
  it:

  cd ~mcidas/mcidas7.7/src
  make uninstall.xcdall

Tom