[noaaport] Thoughts on LDM 6.13.16

Hello everyone,

I don't know if you've noticed, but this week, LDM 6.13.16 was released.
Over the past 3 years, an absolute plethora of LDM bugs have been fixed,
some of which were serious. Thanks to Steve Emmerson and his team at
UNIDATA, and also to Daryl Herzmann, Mike Zuranski, Pete Pokrandt, and Ryan
Hickman, all of us have found and have gotten bugs swatted, like:

1. Hundreds of bugs on the NOAAport ingest side. From miscategorizing some
Level 3 products (putting them into the HRS feed by accident), the LDM
hangs with an "ldmadmin stop", the LDM crashes when a malformed header is
received (that's still not 100%, but it takes a heck of a lot now to make
it crash, and there's a script which will automatically and immediately
restart the LDM if this happens), miscategorized grib headers onto the
wrong feeds, loss of data due to outdated assumptions on feed and product
size, many products not to show up on AWIPS/EDEX/CAVE, and many more.

2. Logging. Logging crashes older versions of the LDM due to a number of
serious bugs, and the error messages sometimes were missing or not useful.
Refactored and fixed.

3. It's not the 1990s anymore: OK, mullets ARE making a comeback, but the
LDM supposes it is still that way with product size and average number of
products. Not anymore.

4. It starts. It stops, Quickly and cleanly. If it sees a problem in the
pqact.conf or ldmd.conf files, it immediately lets you know.

5. Queue corruption: what's that? A number of bugs, some major and some
obscure which caused that issue to occur, have been fixed.

6. One of my disk partitions is full: but the LDM still works. It will
still write data to your not-full partition, and you'll see error messages.

7. Send me an email or a text whenever it goes down for X number of
minutes: Yep, it will do that.

8. New GEMPAK grib tables: ensures you get the MRMS products, and new grid
parameters that have come out.
Because of the updates, it should, barring any unforeseen "gotchas" from
the National Weather Service., will also handle the new super-res Level 3
radar products starting December 1, 2021.

If you would like to honor the IDD and those upstream and downstream from
you, as well as Steve and his team for their hard work, you can help you
make your feeds more stable in some cases, and make your life easier in
others...I very highly recommend you upgrade to this version. If you are a
NOAAport direct ingestion site, I would implore you to upgrade as soon as
possible. You will notice major improvements immediately if you are running
versions 6.13.14 or earlier.

Download:

https://www.unidata.ucar.edu/downloads/ldm/

Installation instructions:

https://www.unidata.ucar.edu/software/ldm/ldm-current/basics/source-install-steps.html

Have a great weekend!
-- 
----

Gilbert Sebenste
Consulting Meteorologist
AllisonHouse, LLC
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