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Preparing the mcidas Account

Follow the steps below to prepare the mcidas and mcadde accounts.

  1. If the workstation does not have mcidas and mcadde accounts, have the system administrator create them.

    The mcidas account should allow logins; the mcadde account should not allow logins. Both of these accounts should be in the same group and both should have the SAME home directory.

  2. If the mcidas and mcadde accounts are not in the same group as the user running the Unidata LDM, have the system administrator put them in the same group. This group should be different than the one that general users are in.

  3. Log on to the workstation as the user mcidas.

  4. Modify the shell-appropriate configuration file: .cshrc for non-conforming shells like csh and tcsh; .profile for Bourne Shell users; .bash_profile for bash; .kshrc for Korn Shell users; etc.

  5. Have the system administrator make sure that the umask setting for the user running the Unidata LDM is 0002.

  6. If you are updating an existing McIDAS-X user and have locally developed McIDAS BATCH files, McBASI scripts, or Tcl/Tk scripts, you should back them up before beginning the installation process.

    All BATCH files and McBASI scripts in the $MCHOME/data directory that have the same name as ones in the Unidata McIDAS-X distribution will be automatically copied to a backup directory, $MCHOME/savedata, but these files can still be overwritten under certain circumstances. Saving the files you have modified before you begin will prevent loss of work later on.


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