[daip] aips help

[Patrick P Murphy]

Hi Robert.  You wrote:

RB> I'm having some trouble adding a new host to our Aips installation,
RB> although I've done this many times successfully in the past.

RB> The new host runs Suse 8.2 which looks like the following:

RB> dop53> uname -r
RB> 2.4.20-64GB-SMP
RB> dop53> 

RB> while our MNJ host (and template machine for DA00 files) looks like:

RB> jop03> uname -r
RB> 2.4.10-4GB
RB> jop03> 

I think the kernel difference may be a bit of a red herring in itself.

RB> Right after entering a user number one gets the following message:

RB> ZLOCK: No locks available
RB> AIPS 1: ZERROR: ON FILE TSTMEM:MED000000;
RB> AIPS 1: ZERROR: IN ZDAOPN ERRNO = 37 (No locks available)

This is a file locking, perhaps NFS issue.  I can give advice on Red
Hat, though while SuSE is different, I believe the methodology is the
same (they both use RPM and the /etc/init.d/ startup scheme, I think).

The key here, as Eric aluded to:

EG> It is not running daemons that are needed for file locking.  I am
EG> not exactly sure which they are of the following:

EG>      lockd
EG>      nfsd
EG>      rpciod
EG>      inetd

EG> I know that 2 of them are needed.

The inetd/xinetd service is likely not involved, but the other three are
the key.  It's almost certainly a missing service.  On my redhat 8
laptop, I can do this:

  bash$ service nfs status
  rpc.mountd (pid 923) is running...
  nfsd (pid 917 916 915 914 913 912 911 908) is running...
  rpc.rquotad (pid 904) is running...
  bash$ service nfslock status
  rpc.statd (pid 739) is running...
  bash$

The "service foo" command is the same as typing "/etc/init.d/foo" so you
can also do "/etc/init.d/nfs status".  My hunch is that nfslock or the
SuSE equivalent is not running or installed on the new system.

RB> Although XAS and MsgServers pop up, there is no POPS to talk to.

Right; ZSTRTA can't get anywhere if it can't lock/read the memory file.

RB> I know that this new Linux version is much more security conscious,
RB> so all sorts of things that used to work (like rlogin) no longer do.

The default configurations for modern Red Hat, SuSE, Mandrake, Debian
and most other Linux distributions is to have services turned off unless
the installer explicitiy turns them on.  The various NFS components are
services, though I'm really not sure why they isolated nfslock off by
itself. 

RB> We already have the DA00 areas of all machines locally placed rather
RB> than centrally.

But the file in question is in "$TSTMEM/MED000000;" which expands to
"$AIPS_VERSION/$ARCH/MEMORY/MED000000;".  That needs to be accessible in
read/write mode by all AIPS users (I think).

Hope this helps.

				- Pat
-- 
   Patrick P. Murphy, Ph.D.              Division Head, CV Computing, NRAO
   Home: http://goof.com/~pmurphy/       Work: http://www.nrao.edu/~pmurphy/
"Laws of nature are...just parochial by-laws in our cosmic patch" - Martin Rees