McIDAS-V Support Forums

I installed McIDAS-V on a new PC with Fedora 27. When I opening McIDAS-V, this message appeared (see attached message)

How to solve this?

Hi Boris-

With the following information, I'm assuming you never had McIDAS-V installed on this new PC. We support -V on Linux Red Hat and have many users on CentOS. We have seen that error previously on other types of Linux systems that don't have 32 libraries installed. We have this information in our User's Guide:

[quote]
Q. Why do I see 'Local servers cannot write to userpath:' errors when starting McIDAS-V?

A. To use local servers in McIDAS-V, there is a background server listening process called mcservl. This process run for the duration of the session, and after McIDAS-V is exited, the process take extra time to terminate. If McIDAS-V is closed and started again before the mcservl process terminates, local servers will not be able to start and the 'Local servers cannot write to userpath:' error occurs. Once this error comes up, click OK. If you attempt connecting to a local dataset, a message will pop up directing you to the ADDE Data Manager, where navigating to the Local Servers -> Start Local Servers menu item will start up the local servers correctly so that local servers can be used in the session. To avoid this error, it is recommended that a user waits about 10 seconds after exiting McIDAS-V before starting again.

Additionally, if running 64bit Debian or Ubuntu operating systems, this message can appear at startup if the ia32-libs package is not installed on the workstation. The ia32-libs are the 32bit libraries that 32bit applications need to execute on a 64bit system.

[quote="jayh"]Hi Boris-

With the following information, I'm assuming you never had McIDAS-V installed on this new PC. We support -V on Linux Red Hat and have many users on CentOS. We have seen that error previously on other types of Linux systems that don't have 32 libraries installed. We have this information in our User's Guide:

[quote]
Q. Why do I see 'Local servers cannot write to userpath:' errors when starting McIDAS-V?

A. To use local servers in McIDAS-V, there is a background server listening process called mcservl. This process run for the duration of the session, and after McIDAS-V is exited, the process take extra time to terminate. If McIDAS-V is closed and started again before the mcservl process terminates, local servers will not be able to start and the 'Local servers cannot write to userpath:' error occurs. Once this error comes up, click OK. If you attempt connecting to a local dataset, a message will pop up directing you to the ADDE Data Manager, where navigating to the Local Servers -> Start Local Servers menu item will start up the local servers correctly so that local servers can be used in the session. To avoid this error, it is recommended that a user waits about 10 seconds after exiting McIDAS-V before starting again.

Additionally, if running 64bit Debian or Ubuntu operating systems, this message can appear at startup if the ia32-libs package is not installed on the workstation. The ia32-libs are the 32bit libraries that 32bit applications need to execute on a 64bit system.

Hi Boris-

Thanks for the information. We don't require that shared library on our test machines, so we aren't sure why Fedora wants it. We have created a new nightly that contains libgfortran.so.3. Please download the installer from: http://www.ssec.wisc.edu/mcidas/software/v/unstable/ and install. Let us know how it works.

Thanks, Jay

Having the same issue, how do I download the same file? This one listed requires a login.

Hello,

The login and password to install the nightly are both: mcv

Please note that the nightly builds are automatically created every day and include all of the previous day's programming changes. This means that not everything has been fully tested and there may be bugs.

This being said, the post suggesting to use the nightly was written in January of 2018. This means that the change would also be included in core McIDAS-V 1.8, which was released in December of 2018. It's unlikely that downloading/installing the 1.9beta1 nightly build will resolve the issue.

A few things for you to answer/check:
[list=1]

Could you please verify that you installed McIDAS-V as your own user (not administrator) and it's installed in your Users/home account (dependent on operating system) and not in some type of a shared directory (such as Program Files).

We've seen cases in the past where this can occur if you don't have full permissions to the McIDAS-V and McIDAS-V-System directories. Could you verify that you have full permissions to these directories?

McIDAS-V's local server process, which is what is throwing this error, requires port 8112 to be open on your machine. Could you please verify that this port is open?

Could you please let me know what operating system you are running on?

Something that you could try that might give us some more information about what's going on:
[list=1]

Start up McIDAS-V, and from the Main Display window choose Edit > Preferences.

From the User Preferences window, select the Advanced tab.

Change the "Log Level" dropdown from "INFO" to "TRACE" and click OK.

Exit and restart McIDAS-V.

Click OK through the Error.

In the Main Display window, choose Help > Show Support Request Form.

Fill out the fields Request McIDAS-V Support window. Mention in the Description that the report you're sending is related to this forum post.

Click Send Request.

This support request could potentially give us a more detailed error message, as well as some information about your system that may help us diagnose what's going on.

Thanks,
Bob Carp
McIDAS Help Desk

Hello,

Thanks for submitting the support request. Probably the most significant point is that you're on a Ubuntu machine. We don't have an Ubuntu machine here to test ourselves (we only have Red Hat Enterprise Linux). However, there is actually another forum post where an Ubuntu user was having problems with local servers as well.

[url=https://mcidas.ssec.wisc.edu/forums/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=1501]Local servers cannot write to userpath[/url]

This user was running on a 64-bit Ubuntu machine. It's a bit of a lengthy thread with some testing we had him do, but ultimately what fixed the problem was to install the ia32-libs package. If this isn't installed, could you install it and give McIDAS-V another try? If this doesn't work, we'll have you run some additional tests.

Thanks again,
Bob