[daip] AIPS Site Setup

[Terry Hancock]

Hi,

I've been given the task of setting up AIPS along with
a variety of other tools at IPAC (Caltech/JPL). I'm
pretty new to AIPS, so I'm not really familiar with the
history of the program or its complete structure, but
there appear to be some serious violations of the 
"software application" model that I'm accustomed to on
Unix systems, so I need to figure out how to resolve
them. Specifically:

1) The AIPS install wants a list of all hostnames that
   will be used with it. Furthermore, the hostnames in
   HOSTS.LIST (a previous installation) are in all-caps,
   so they're not really Unix hostnames (though I'm
   guessing they are simply mapped to them).
   
   Is it possible to create a single "LOCALHOST" entry
   and allow any computer on the net (Since localhost
   = 127.0.0.1 always resolves to the current computer
   under Unix)?
   
2) AIPS wants to maintain user data directories under
   the AIPS $AIPS_ROOT directory.  On this network, 
   that area is intended to be mounted read-only, so
   that won't work. Can I use an environment variable
   based path for users?  I.e. $HOME/.aips/ instead of
   an absolute path.
   
I would like this set up so that any user on any host
that can mount the partition AIPS is loaded on can
use the system without a centralized installation.

The standard Unix approach is to keep program and
user areas clearly separated -- by making all user
specific directories relative to the user's home
directory, for example.  Program areas are generally
read-only for security reasons.

Given that AIPS is deployed mostly on Unix networks
nowadays, I would think that you've probably dealt with
these kinds of issues in the past. I'd be interested
to know what sort of solutions have been found for them.

Thank you,
Terry

------------------------------------------------------
* Terry Hancock -- Science Software Support  -- IPAC *
* hancock at ipac.caltech.edu                           *
------------------------------------------------------