Local System Preparation

Creating the WXP Account

Before downloading the WXP software, it is advisable to setup a WXP user account for compiling and managing WXP. A WXP group should be set up as well.  The WXP account will have a password, and a home directory assigned to it.

Disk space requirements

Here is a planning sheet for disk space requirements for WXP:

File Type Disk Space Required Comments
WXP binaries 40 MB yes  
WXP database files 20-40 MB yes Depends on map files downloaded
WXP documentation 20 MB no Use online documentation.
Sample data
 100MB yes Usually, WXP is run off live data feed.

Make sure enough space is allocated prior to downloading WXP. A rough estimate is no less than 75MB.

Directory structure

The WXP programs themselves will not take up much disk space but the data will.   Therefore it is necessary to make sure enough disk space is available.   Second, the documentation assumes a regular directory structure.  The files may be placed under the wxp home directory /home/wxp or in /usr/local/wxp.  The documentation will list "/home/wxp" in all examples but other directory setups can be used as well.

Once the root directory for WXP is established, it is recommended to create the following directory structure:

Directory Contents
/home/wxp/bin Contains the binary executable files for WXP
/home/wxp/etc Contains database files used by WXP
/home/wxp/scripts Contains scripts to run WXP programs
/home/wxp/lib
/home/wxp/include/WXP
 Contains the WXP library and include files if using WXP 6 API
/home/wxp/doc Contains the HTML and PDF documentation
/home/wxp/data
/home/wxp/text
/home/wxp/model
/home/wxp/sat
/home/wxp/...		 Sample data directories. Multiple directories are set up for better organization of data.
/home/wxp/convert
/home/wxp/grid
/home/wxp/raw
/home/wxp/images		 WXP converted/decoded files.  For NOAAPORT systems, this will be on the data server.
WXP generated grid files
WXP generated raw files
WXP generated image files

Network configuration

When using WXP in a network setup, that the binaries and database files be placed in a standard location such as /usr/local/wxp/bin and /usr/local/wxp/etc.  These are standard locations for networked files and most user paths are already set up to search these directories.  The /usr/local directory can be NFS mounted from a file server or the files copied into each workstation.  Another possibility is to mount the /home/wxp directory on each computer and add /home/wxp/bin to each user's PATH.

Account Permissions

WXP will read and process data saved by the ingestor.  Permissions should be set up so that user can access the data.  In some cases, this will mean making sure the wxp home directory is accessible by everyone:

/home/wxp> chmod a+rx .

If the source of live data is on a remote system, again make sure users can read those directories.

WXP Group

All administrative users of WXP should be members of the wxp group so they can manage ingested files and decode data if needed.  In some cases, group permission won't be set, so check permissions to make sure they look like this:

   4 drwxrwxr-x  10 wxp      wxp         512 Aug 30 13:59 .
   4 drwxrwxr-x   9 root     sys         512 Oct 15 16:15 ..
   2 drwxrwxr-x   2 wxp      wxp        1024 Oct 15 23:35 bin
  20 drwxrwxr-x   2 wxp      wxp       17408 Oct 15 23:35 convert
  32 drwxrwxr-x   2 wxp      wxp       32256 Oct 15 23:35 data
   4 drwxrwxr-x   2 wxp      wxp        2048 Oct 15 23:35 etc
   4 drwxrwxr-x   2 wxp      wxp        3072 Oct 15 23:35 grid
   8 drwxrwxr-x   2 wxp      wxp        7680 Oct 15 23:35 image
   8 drwxrwxr-x   2 wxp      wxp        4608 Oct 15 23:35 raw
  32 drwxrwxr-x   2 wxp      wxp       32256 Oct 15 23:35 src

If not, chmod with g+w for these directories. 

WXP files should be set with similar permissions.

   4 -rw-rw-r--   1 wxp      wxp          397 Jun 29 00:14 wxp.clr
   4 -rw-rw-r--   1 wxp      wxp          320 Jun 30 11:14 wxp.fnl

For further information about WXP, email devo@ks.unisys.com
Last updated by Dan Vietor, March 2007