[daip] questions about external hard disk and aips

[Eric Greisen]

Cheng-Yu Kuo wrote:
>          To whom it may concern:
> 
>        My name is Cheng-Yu Kuo, a graduate student at UVa astronomy 
> department.
> Recently, I got a new external hard disk, and it has been reformatted to 
> ext3 so
> that the disk space will be available to AIPS (It was vfat format). In order 
> to let AIPS
> see the disk, I was suggested to copy the DADEVS.LIST to my home directory, 
> and add a line
> at the end of the new .dades file as "
> 
> +  /media/usbdisk/aips/CKUO_1
> 
> Here, /media/usbdisk/ is the directory of the external disk, and I have 
> created two
> directories under which I wish my aips data to be.
> 
> When I started up AIPS after these steps, I saw:
> 
> START_AIPS: User data area assignments:
>    (Using private file /users/ckuo/.dadevs for DADEVS.PL)
>                    /media/usbdisk/aips/CKUO_1 is currently unavailable.
>     Disk 1 (1) is /DATA/DELENN_1
>     Disk 2 (2) is /DATA/DELENN_2
>     Disk 3 (3) is /DATA/DELENN_3
>                    /DATA/DELENN_4 is currently unavailable.
> 
> I don't really know why my external hard disk is not available to AIPS. Do I 
> miss any steps?

Probably the only thing missing is a 0-byte file named SPACE
in the new data area.  It must be writable to anyone who will use the 
disk.  cd to that area and "touch SPACE".

I take it that the name of your computer is DELENN.  If you named the 
directory on /media/usbdisk/aips/DELENN_5 then you could put a minus 
sign rather than a plus sign in column one of the ~/.dadevs file.  Then 
this area would not become your aips disk 1.  That is a special disk to 
save the SAVE/GET files, message files, etc and would not be so good for 
a disk that might not always be available.  (Note that the _n parts of 
the names are not important, they are a convention, but the presence of 
the host name is important.)

Eric Greisen