wviewweather.com

Guest

Ok, so I got xview up and running yesterday. Thought I would share my experience in hopes of making things go better for others in the future.

First, my setup:

Vantage Pro 2
2.0Ghz iMac running Tiger
Postgres 8.0.3 running on the iMac

I first tried to install without using Darwin Ports because, well, it's a religious thing. It was going OK except when I got to libGD which, as far as I can tell, just won't compile "stand alone." So I bit the bullet and did Darwin Ports which worked for libGD much better.

However, the following problems exist, most of which have to do with my desire to use Postscript as my database:

1. The autoconfiguration scripts for radlib and wview don't know how to find Postscript (either the includes or the libraries) and there is no configure option to tell them where they are. My Postscript was downloaded directly from the Postscript web site and installed in the default directories, namely /usr/local/pgsql/include and /usr/local/pgsql/lib.

The configure scripts for radlib and wview didn't find them there and did not add those directories as -L and -I targets to the makefiles. Once I added them manually, after running configure, things worked.

2. Postscript is different from mysql when it comes to how it handles case. In particular, when wview creates the archive table, it uses mixed case to name the attributes. Postscript collapses all that to lower case (all the attribute names in the table are lower case).

This causes trouble later when xview/radlib try and query the table. I changed a bunch of strcmp's to strcasecmps to fix it.

3. Postscripts timestamp format is "yyyymmdd hhmmss" wview was trying to insert a timestamp as "yyyymmddhhmmss" (i.e. no space). I assume it works in mysql. Doesn't in Postscript.

4. The OS X startup script starts all the daemons except for wunderground. I had to add that one manually.

You can see my station at: http://fluckmill.dyndns.org/~weather/

greg travis

mteel · Joined: 30 Jun 2005 Posts: 435 Location: Collinsville, TX

Whew! You went through some issues. Let me try to address them one by one:

Guest · Posted: Wed Aug 17, 2005 2:26 pm Post subject:

Don't take my comments as being critical -- I really like wview and, if anything, want to encourage you to keep developing it! My comments were aimed more at those attempting to go down the same road as I, not at criticism of wview itself.

I agree that my "fixes" for the case problem were of the slash-n-burn variety. It was 10PM last night and I just wanted to start getting rows into the database.

What version of Postgres did you test against? Again, I'm running 8.0.3 on the iMac which I built by doing nothing more than downloading it from the Postgres site, doing a ./configure, a make, and a make install. No other tweaking. Is it possible that you tested with 7.x.y?

oh, one other thing (and this isn't a wview criticism either) but the OS X Tiger defaults for shared memory are embarassingly low. xview/radlib won't run on Tiger by default because it can't get enough shared memory.

The solution is to edit /etc/rc and change the line that says:

sysctl -w kern.sysv.shmmax=4194304 kern.sysv.shmmin=1 kern.sysv.shmmni=32 kern.sysv.shmseg=8 kern.sysv.shmall=1024

To something more reasonable. I use:

sysctl -w kern.sysv.shmmax=536870912 kern.sysv.shmmin=1 kern.sysv.shmmni=32 kern.sysv.shmseg=8 kern.sysv.shmall=131072

Finally, yes, I initially started with 1.7.0 -- that must have been where the wunderground daemon problems came in. I'm running 1.7.1 now.

Thanks for a great package!

greg
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mteel · Joined: 30 Jun 2005 Posts: 435 Location: Collinsville, TX

No problem. Just wanted you to know where I was coming from and how I developed the PostgreSQL support. I'm not as sensitive as that may have sounded, but I have been getting deluged with new oddball requirements lately and I have to seriously back off on the time I have been investing in wview going forward. Time for the more astute wview users to get involved in the effort!

I definitely was using 7.3.X when I was testing - I have no idea if that makes a difference.

I would really appreciate any time you can spend working out the best solution for the timestamp and case issues for the column names. You should be able to investigate how MySQL does things vs. PostgreSQL online without installing it. Yes, I know you don't care about MySQL - I don't care about PostgreSQL - but I have tried to provide it for those who do. Any help would be greatly appreciated and noted in the AUTHORS file.

Thanks for the heads up on the shared memory - I don't recall having to dork with that on my 10.3.8 install, but I have slept since then. I will add that to the MacOSX Quick Start Guide. See there, you are already contributing!

Thanks,
Mark

mteel · Joined: 30 Jun 2005 Posts: 435 Location: Collinsville, TX

FYI, you need to move Clouds.jpg from /var/wview/img to your web site document root. It would be a good idea to move all files in /var/wview/img there in case you ever need them. Then you will have a nice cloud background Smile