[daip] Re: linadm at mpia-hd.mpg.de

[Eric Greisen]

Ulrich Hiller writes:
 > Dear Mr. Greisen,
 > Mr. Schmidt from the Max-Planck-Institute for Radioastrnomy forwarded
 > the following mail from you:
 > 
 > >Do either of you have any idea who is behind this address?  It is
 > >clearly an address for the the e-mail is not read.  I get 4 messages a
 > >day from them and they clearly need my help with their MNJ.  I suspect
 > >that it failed to compile a lot of stuff that it should have done but
 > >somehow is not only failing on the most recent.  I tried e-mailing
 > >them but I suspect no human examines this e-mail address.
 > 
 > Ok, we are behind the linadm at mpia-hd.mpg.de.
 > So, from which of our hosts do you get the messages?
 > What could be the reason for the problems?
 > 

I do not know why the MNJ is failing at your site - only that I get
the cryptic message that a particular task failed to compile and link.

 I have a number of concerns.  First, the initial reports I received
showed that some time had passed between when you took the tar-ball
from us and when you first ran the MNJ.  In particular, the report
showed some weeks worth of changes in our CHANGE.DOC file.  But, the
report showed only a few things to be compiled and link edited - too
few to be consistent with the CHANGE.DOC diff.  I fear that either the
MNJ failed but still updated the LASTCOMRPL.DAT and LASTCOMLNK.DAT
files (indicating success) or that when MAKE.MNJ ran, you gave it a
current date rather than the date of the tar ball (or before).

The correction for this is to 

cd $AIPS_ROOT
. LOGIN.SH       (or source LOGIN.CSH for C shells)
$CDTST

cd $TST/$ARCH/UPDATE

edit the files LASTCOMRPL.DAT and LASTCOMLNK.DAT to put in a date say
2 or 3 months ago (it really will not matter much).  Then run the MNJ
again.

The second concern is that the MNJ is failing as a cron.  I suspect
that that is due to the poor environment that a cron job begins with.
One often has to edit the do_daily script to define $PATH to include
much more than the cron starts with.  You could add print (echo)
statements to the do_daily to see what it is doing.  You should try to
run the do_daily script interactively to see if it works that way
first.  That will also clear up the missing backlog of compiles.

Third, it does help that a human sees the e-mails each day to see that
it works.  Fabian Walter would probably be the right human to get
copies of the reports.  (Edit the file $SYSLOCAL/UPDCONFIG to add
Walter to the e-mail lists.)

Eric Greisen