[daip] Unable to start AIPS

[Patrick P Murphy]

I'm not an "AIP" anymore but I do help them out from time to time.  I also
know a little about freebsd (having a guest account on goof.com helps).

On Mon, 17 Dec 2001 23:38:20 -0600, John Kenagy <jktheowl at earthlink.net>
   said: 

> The platform is FreeBSD with the Linux emulator enabled. The emulation
> is thru the kernel and the libraries and does not use any kind of a
> "meta" machine. It will run about 90% of Linux applications.

Fascinating.  We did try a port of AIPS to OpenBSD a while back, but gave
up after the guy doing it lost interest and we could only get about 60% of
the performance that Linux gave on similar hardware.  I always thought a
FreeBSD port (full-blown) would not be hard.

> I think the system is tighter with regard to internet type services due
> to security concerns than the older releases were.

Ah.  Then you might want to read the HELP file ($HLPFIL/XAS.HLP) for XAS
(the TV "server") and think if Unix socket TVs might not be a better
thing.  Also, remember you can get the bare bones system going with "aips
notv tpok pr=1" to suppress the startup of XAS, the tek and message
servers and the TPMON daemons.

> 1) None of the required services are found though they are listed in
> the /etc/services file.

Check for case sensitivity.  This was an issue way back in the SunOS-4 to
Solaris migration days and you might be experiencing something similar
(i.e. documented and empirical behaviour differed).

> I have also tried defining them in inetd.conf

???  You don't want to use inetd.conf for any of the AIPS services; none
of them are compliant with the interface inetd or xinetd expects.

> How are they attached to the AIPS processes? 

The servers and tasks use a getservbyname() call to translate,
e.g. "sssin" into a port number.

> 2) Note the two libraries are not being found. How does AIPS know
> where to look for these? 

On a Linux system, I'd try "ldd $TST/$ARCH/LOAD/AIPS.EXE" to see where the
dynamic libraries were expected.  For libtermcap, it probably expects it
in /usr/lib if the system was built on a Linux system, or failing that, in
$TST/$ARCH/LIBR/GNU/ (but what's there is usually libreadline.a, a static
library; if you're getting an error like below, I'd suspect the AIPS
binaries are looking for the dynamic library).

You can probably use LD_LIBRARY_PATH to fix this issue, but I hate
recommending that; its use often creates more problems than it solves.

>      libXext.so.6: ELF file OS ABI invalid

Ouch.

> may indicate some difference in compiled code which is incompatible. Is
> it possible to obtain a compatible library and place it in an AIPS only
> search path?

It's possible, but I wouldn't bet real money on it working (though I would
try it anyway).  Did you get the binaries from us, or did you build them?

> ____________________library locations__________________________

> /usr/lib/compat/aout/libtermcap.so.2.1
> /usr/lib/compat/libtermcap.so.2
> /usr/X11R6/lib/aout/libXext.so.6.3
> /usr/X11R6/lib/libXext.so.6
> _______________________________________________

Could it be that you need a Linux compatibility version of libXext.so?
Also, is the /usr/lib/compat/libtermcap.so in ELF format?  We stopped
using a.out years ago.

Dunno if any of this helps.

				- Pat