[daip] Aips datafile issues

[Brian Pohl]

Greetings Aip of the day,

As it will become immediately apparent, I know nothing about AIPS.  I am
merely a humble sysadmin (and aspiring optical astronomer) who has been
tasked with installing and supporting AIPS on a solaris 7 system (yeah
yeah, we're upgrading this summer....)


One of my users is having some trouble with his data.  He's been selecting
user ID 2 and 3 to manage data catalogues.  Recently, the data he had
accumulated under user ID 2 is no longer being recognized by AIPS.  the
physical datafiles (<some string>.002) are still on the physical disk, but
when he logs into AIPS as user ID 2, his catalogue is empty.  According to
him, this problem "just happened one day".

My intuition is that this is a common problem with a simple solution, but
i'll elaborate further because our setup is a little different.

We are running AFS with AIPS stored on an AFS volume.  because of our
volume management logic (or lack thereof), we are careful to seperate
software volumes from data volumes.  AIPS "out of the box" wants to store
data in the same directory tree, or at least in a fixed location specified
in the DADEVS.LIST file.  We wanted to have data stored in user space, so I
modified the source code slightly so that DADEVS.LIST would interpret the
~ character as the path to the user's home directory.  Hence our
DADEVS.LIST file simply contains:

+  ~/AIPS/DATA


And we instruct users to create a subdirectory of their home directory
AIPS/DATA etc...  This worked fine until the aforementioned problem occured
last week.

I appreciate your thoughts, concerns, etc...  Is there something inherently
flawed in our setup, is this user error?

thanks for your help,

bri.


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Brian Pohl

Assistant Unix Administrator	UNC Dept. of Physics and Astronomy
Phllips hall rm. 249		  Networking, Infrastructure and Computing
phone: 919-962-6494	            http://www.panic.unc.edu


	"... going to hell in a disco baset."

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