What Happens when GFE Server Starts

Files Created/Updated and their Location

The CONFIGURED-level Text Products and Text Utilities files are created and then updated in the textProducts and textUtilities directories in the /awips2/edex/data/utility/cave_static/configured/XXX/gfe/userPython directory where XXX is your site id. The CONFIGURED-level Edit Areas, Edit Area Groups, and Sample Sets are created in the editAreas, editAreaGroups, and sampleSets directories in the /awips2/edex/data/utility/common_static/configured/XXX/gfe directory where XXX is your site id.

The very first time a user logs onto CAVE, that user's caveData directory is created in the /home/username directory. Every subsequent time a user logs onto CAVE, that user's caveData directory is updated.

EDEX logs are created in the /awips2/edex/logs directory on the EDEX cluster (dv3, dv4, and dv5). The EDEX logs on dv3, dv4, and dv5 are different from each other. The AlertViz and CAVE startup shutdown console logs are created in the /home/username/caveData/logs/consoleLogs/machinename directory.

Files Created/Updated By

The CONFIGURED-level Text Products and Text Utilities files are created by the /awips2/edex/data/utility/common_static/base/gfe/textproducts/preferences/configureTextProducts.py python script which is run via the configureTextProducts.sh shell script located in the /awips2/GFESuite/bin directory from templates which are located in the /awips2/edex/data/utility/common_static/base/gfe/textproducts/templates directory on dv3/4/5. The configureTextProducts shell script is run when EDEX is started or restarted. The python script contains a list of possible PILs which are compared against the site's afos2awips2.txt file to determine what gets generated. The CONFIGURED-level Edit Areas, Edit Area Groups, and Sample Sets are created by EDEX. More details on how the CONFIGURED-level Edit Areas are created and updated is in the paragraph below.

When the GFE server starts, it looks at the CONFIGURED-level Edit Areas and if the creation date is earlier than recent localMaps.py or shapefile changes, the GFE server will regenerate them. When the GFE server generates the edit areas, it uses the information in the Maps.py file or any override in the localMaps.py file to determine which edit areas to create and how to name them. Each map's geographic data is compared to the grid cells in the GFE domain and wherever the center point of that cell falls is which edit area the cell gets assigned to. For instance, if a GFE grid point straddles two edit area zones such as land and marine, as shown below, the point will be assigned to the edit area that contains the center point. In this case, even though the majority of the cell is water, much of that water is assigned as land in the shapefile and the center point is in the "land" area and thus this cell is a part of the land zone, the VAZ055 edit area, not the marine zone, the ANZ536 edit area.

For more information on the Maps.py and localMaps.py files go here.

The GFE Server prompts a user's caveData directory to be created or updated, if it already exists, through the EDEX request process through a sync of the Site's Localization, using the .md5 checksum files. This includes creating the AlertViz and CAVE startup shutdown console log files. EDEX prompts the various EDEX and GFESuite log files to be created.