Shipboard process

Shipboard process

The shipboard process was designed to automate the invocation of VICKI and the VIF2staging process that creates the staging database. It was evolved by Mike McCann. It runs on the UNIX machine lobos on the ship R/V Pt. Lobos, and requires that the user vicki to remain logged in to lobos after closing the VICKI application down.

The VIF2staging process is initiated by the user closing the VICKI application. First, an ascii VIF file is generated from the interpretation (INT) file - this is done when VICKI is properly exited. Then, VIF2staging is called to run on the VIF file and to place the HTML staging database file on host ariel. Then, Netscape opens (Netscape is started by the VIF2staging process) on lobos with the staging database in the browser. Printing the staging database from Netscape needs to be done by the user.

The samples shipboard documentation tells the user to execute the 'vicki' command from a 'ventana' login to lobos. The vicki command is simply a script to log into lobos as user vicki with the assurance that X clients (i.e. the VICKI application) can display on the lobos Xserver. Here is the bash script that does this. The login as user vicki on lobos is special. We wanted to have the startup of vicki to be automatic, yet all of the files be owned by user vicki. This is accomplished by adding some lines to vicki's .login file. After the user is logged in the start script is run, unless there is some indication that vicki is already running, in which case the user is given the option to enter the 'start' command to force a removal of the start.log file and start up vicki.

All start.log files are e-mailed to the samples coordinator and developer when the start script finishes, and that is after vicki is exited, the VIF2staging script has finished and the annotation files transferred to the shore-side computer calypso.

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