PRECIS

(The following instructions assume that you have already installed PRECIS and have received a hard drive containing boudary data)

1) The drive should physically be put in the system - either internally or externally (if a USB/Firewire hard drive enclosure is used). Take care to modify the Master or Slave status on the hard drive by moving the jumper on the back of the drive. External devices generally want the drive to be set as Master.

2) Once the computer boots up, you might go into the BIOS (if you connected the drive internally) to make sure the hard drive has been detected.

3) Boot into Linux.

4) Mount the disk. Linux should assign a device number to the drive (or to the external USB device).

For example, a hard drive connected internally as the master on the secondary IDE port will be /dev/hdc1 (mounted as slave on the secondary port, it would be /dev/hdd1). For a USB device, it is likely to be something like /dev/sda1.

5) Create a mount point *as root* - if you want the disk mounted as /precisdata, do something like

mkdir -m 0777 /precisdata

6) Mount the disk - the file system should be autodetected, so something like this should work:

mount /dev/hdc1 /precisdata

7) You can modify /etc/fstab if you want the drive to mount each time the computer is booted

8) Now you have two choices that depend upon whether you want to keep the disk as it is or copy the data on the hard drive to another location.

Either way, the relevant information is found in the ~/setvars  file of the base install directory (i.e.: /home/precis/setvars ).

You are looking for two variables in setvars:

PP4LBCDIR=

DUMPSDIR=

Your two choices are to

a. Copy the files from the mounted disk to wherever $PP4LBCDIR and $DUMPSDIR are set to (by default, they will be ~/pp4lbc and ~/dumps)

b. Edit the setvars file (using vi/emacs/pico etc) and change PP4LBCDIR= and DUMPSDIR= to the newly mounted drive, example:

PP4LBCDIR=/precisdata

DUMPSDIR=/precisdata/dumps

whatever you decide, please remember the following:

* Make sure that you unzip the files on the disk I sent - they are zipped if I needed to save space on the hard drive. PRECIS requires that they are unzipped!

You may not be able to unzip all the files on the disk (due to disk space issues) - this is OK if you intend to run one experiment at a time - you can just unzip the files in the runid directories as you use them.

* PP4LBCDIR is set up to expect the runids as subdirectories. So if you copy an experiment from /precisdata to $PP4LBCDIR , then copy it as a subdirectory - for example,

mkdir -m 0777 /home/precis/pp4lbc/addja

cp /precisdata/addfa/* /home/precis/pp4lbc/addja

Conversely, if you modify setvars, set $PP4LBCDIR to be one directory above where the runids live.  PRECIS will expect to see the directories in that directory that are named as runids.

i.e.

PP4LBCDIR=/precisdata (since /precisdata will have all the runids)

DUMPSDIR is the opposite - it expects all the dumps to be in one location. So if you set

DUMPSDIR=/precisdata/dumps

You will only be able to run an experiment with control ensemble member 1.

It is probably better to copy the dump files from your desired experiment straight to $DUMPSDIR

cp /precisdata/dumps/* /home/precis/dumps

If you edit setvars, make sure you source the file before you restart PRECIS, i.e.

precis@ares:~> . ~/setvars

precis@ares:~> precis &

This should be what it takes to get PRECIS running, assuming you have chosen your region.

Further information about setvars and choosing the region is in the PRECIS tech manual