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20020305: setting up McIDAS datasets using DSSERVE

>From: Edward Hindman <address@hidden>
>Organization: CCNY
>Keywords: 200203060049.g260nKK25416 McIDAS DSSERVE

Hi Ward,

>My student Kamal Thapa and I are conducting a study using McIDAS.  We have 
>been able to download historic images from the SSEC and analyze them 
>using McIDAS following instructions at 
>
>www.sci.ccny.cuny.edu/~hindman/eas308/LECT16.htm

Sounds good so far...

>In fact, you wrote a portion of those instructions last spring earning 
>yourself the "E-mail visiting professor" title.

Yes, a title I am proud of :-)

>Just today we found the DSSERVE LIST MYDATA and the DSSERVE ADD 
>MYDATA/IMAGES AREA 1 9999 "All images in AREA format commands do not 
>work; we cannot append MYDATA to our McIDAS session to analyze the 
>downloaded images.

Hmm...  This is strange to say the least.

>We are running McIDAS at address@hidden
>As soon as possible, could you run  McIDAS on Cirrus and 
>see what you learn and advise us how to correct our instructions in Lect16?

Will do.

>Thank you!

No worries.

Here is what I found:

First, the DSSERVE invocation will update a file called RESOLV.SRV, and
this file should be located (created/maintained) in your McIDAS working
directory.  In the case of the user you are interested in, this would
be in /home/wxnut/mcidas/data.  I took a quick look at this file, and
saw that it was 1 byte in length:

[wxnut@cirrus data]$ ls -alt RESOLV.SRV
-rw-r--r--    1 wxnut    mcidas          1 Mar  5 15:07 RESOLV.SRV

This is very strange since the entries that get written into RESOLV.SRV
are somewhat long.  A quick probe of the file shows that the one character
was bogus.  Given this, I deleted the file:

[wxnut@cirrus data]$ rm RESOLV.SRV

Now, since the object is to setup the MYDATA dataset, and since Unidata
McIDAS is delivered with a McIDAS BATCH file to setup this dataset,
I decided to try and use the BATCH file.  What I found was not good:

Program terminated, segmentation violation

This tells me that there is something wrong with the executable for
DSSERVE.  In order to find this problem, I will need to rebuild the
executable for DSSERVE, and to do that, I will need the login to
cirrus as the user 'mcidas'.  Hold on, I just guessed it.

Since I have to run to a meeting (wild fire mitigation), I manually
created the RESOLV.SRV file in ~wxnut/mcidas/data.  I can now look at
the AREA files in that directory:

[wxnut@cirrus data]$ imglist.k MYDATA/IMAGES.1002
Image file directory listing for:MYDATA/IMAGES
 Pos Satellite/         Date       Time      Center   Band(s)
     sensor                                 Lat  Lon
 --- -------------  ------------  --------  ---- ---- ------------
1002  G-10 IMG      10 JAN 02010  02:00:00    24  137 4
imglist.k: done

I will look into the DSSERVE failure more later tonight or tomorrow
morning.

One quick comment:

There are several AREA files with improper names:

AREA611
AREA614
...
AREA923

AREA files must be named AREAnnnn, where nnnn can vary from 0001 to 9999.
nnnn _must_ be a 4 digit number.

Tom