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19990827: McIDAS - RedHat 5.2 (cont.)

>From: Michael Keables <address@hidden>
>Organization: DU
>Keywords: 199908262233.QAA03752 McIDAS RedHat 6.0 Linux

Mike,

>Ok, I've ordered a copy of Red Hat 5.2 ... should be here first part of
>next week.

Excellent.  I think that this will make your life easier in the short
to intermediate time frame.  At some point, we will have the bugs
worked out for 6.0.

>While I'm at it, let me tell you what our plans are here and get your
>advice. We've loaded the LDM on our Sun Ultra 10 (I'm waiting for the
>upstream feed IPs so that I can configure the LDM and launch it.) We are
>planning to use the Sun as the main IDD ingester which will feed the
>student PC workstations. 

Sounds like a good plan.  When you say "feed" the PC workstations, what
exactly do you mean?  What I mean is I assume that you will make a
disk partition on your Ultra 10 accessible via NFS to the PCs.  This
way the decoded data files for McIDAS/GEMPAK will be directly accessible.
In the McIDAS arena, you will want to setup the McIDAS ADDE remote server
on the Ultra 10 so that McIDAS sessions can share the decoded data on
the Ultra 10 via ADDE.  Our experience is that ADDE access to data can
be _LOTS_ faster than reading files directly with NFS.  This is especially
true when the machine mounting (or exporting) the NFS drive is running
Linux.  Linux's current inplementation of NFS is very slow when compared
to other OSes.  ADDE access, however, is nice and fast.

>Questions:
>
>1. Does each student workstation will need to have the LDM loaded
>in order to receive the data products for mcidas?

I think that you will want to run the LDM on one machine: the Ultra 10.
The decoders will also run there, and the decoded data products will
be made available by allowing the PCs to mount the file system containing
the decoded files by NFS.  Again, for McIDAS you will want to be transitioning
to use of ADDE.

>2. While I'm waiting for the new operating system, is there anything
>(beside reading the documentation) that I can doto  accelerate the loading
>of mcidas? I assume that I'm going to have to re-load all of the files once
>the new OS is installed, but as classes are getting underway here in a
>couple of weeks, I'd like to streamline the process as much as possible.

I just talked to our system administrator about what the easiest
path from 6.0 to 5.2 would be, and he and I agreed that it would probably
be fastest to wipe the disk and do a fresh install.  This way you would be
sure of what is there and what is not there.

Before you do this, I need to know a couple of things.  Did your machine
come with 6.0 loaded on it?  (I think that either you or Deb was were
looking at Dells and one can order Dells with Linux installed).  If
Linux was pre-loaded, can you check to see if your system came with
f2c installed (I don't think that it did since you asked which f2c
stuff you should grab from the AT&T FTP site)?  If f2c _is_ installed
(doubtful), then we may want to try and do a McIDAS build as things
stand now.  This would be more for my interest sake than anything else.

Is your machine (or machines) accessible on the net?  If so, could I
get a login (as 'mcidas' if the account exists) so I could look at
a completely clean installation of RedHat 6.0 (our system admin had
munged quite a bit of the system before I could take a look).  If not,
no problem.

Tom

>From address@hidden  Fri Aug 27 15:14:08 1999

I wasn't exactly sure how to distribute the files between the Ultra 10 and the
PCs. Partitioning the Ultra 10 disk sounds like the way to go.

re: how Linux was installed
The Dells came with Linux installed. It came with gcc but not f2c.

re: get a look at 6.0 installation
Right now the Dells are on the network but don't have permanent IP
addresses (we do the DHCP thing now which is a pain at times.) I've
requested addresses from our system admin folks and should get them
here any day. Once I get the IP's I'll let you take a look at one of
the machines with RedHat 6.0.