Zeh User Notes

Setup

To run the Zeh plotting software on Data General systems, add the following to your .login or .cshrc file. Please remove all other "zeh-related" environment variable and path settings from your .login and/or .cshrc files.

General Notes

Zeh Graphic Systems provides two Windows applications programs, zsub and shq. These programs are available only on Data General systems. zsub is used to submit plots to the Versatec plotter, and shq is used to monitor plots that are being processed.

On the DGs and other systems, tools have been provided to submit jobs to the Versatec plotter without requiring a Windows interface. These tools are described below.

Submitting a plot job is a simple process: processing parameters are saved in a .par file (manually or by running zsub), then the .par file and the file to be plotted are ftp'd to edcsnw29. The Sun processes the job in two phases:

Problems

1) The biggest draw on system resources is generally due to unneccesary reprocessing, which can happen when the user requires multiple copies of a plot. Please do not submit your plot multiple times; this causes the file to be interpreted and rasterized every time.

The simplest way to obtain multiple copies of a plot is to select the number of copies that you require when the original job is submitted. When this is done, the file is interpreted and rasterized once, then plotted as many times as you requested.

There is a limit to the number of copies that will actually work, based on a hardware limit related to the maximum length of paper that the Versatec can handle. While Zeh can't seem to tell us exactly what that limit is, the rumor is that it is about 200". So, if you require a large number of copies, please do the following:

2) Another area of concern is the disk space on edcsnw29: there is approximately 800Mb available for processing plots. For each job, there is about another 20% of diskspace required for intermediate files. Because the Zeh software doesn't automatically clean up very well, it is possible for the system to become full. When this happens, all subsequent jobs will fail without the user being notified. The failures continue until the operators clean up the files and restart the processing queues. Therefore, please use the verplot-d and vsub programs to see how much space is available, and work with the operators to arrange time to submit large jobs during off-shift hours.

Tools

These tools are available on all systems. They are initiated as part of the LAS setup.

  1. verplot - A UNIX shell script that creates the .par and .ftp files needed to process a job, and ftp's the files to the Sun. The program automatically checks for free Sun disk space, and aborts if not enough is available.

    verplot is also available in LAS. This is a procedure PDF that runs the verplot shell script. Note that "in=-disk" will perform the Sun disk space check. Documentation for this program can be found in lasdoc.

  2. vsub - A UNIX shell script that runs verplot -d before running zsub. This program is only available on the DGs. Please use it to check available disk space before submitting a job in zsub.

  3. zsubmitftp - A UNIX shell script used to submit an existing or group of existing .ftp and .par files to edcsnw29 for plotting.

  4. zeditpar - A UNIX shell script used to edit an existing or group of existing .par files.

    The above command will replace all occurrences of paper with mylar in the rooster.par file as well as rooster1.par, rooster2.par, etc. In other words, the file name specified is treated as a wildcard.

  5. zeditftp - A UNIX shell script used to edit an existing or group of existing .ftp files.

    The above command will replace all occurrences of huewe with huewe/rooster/zeh in the rooster.ftp file as well as rooster1.ftp, rooster2.ftp, etc. In other words, the file name specified is treated as a wildcard. This tool can be useful for the user who chooses to move the .ftp and .par files for a particular project into a subdirectory (zsub puts all these files in the user's root directory). This script can be used to change all references to the user's root directory to the appropriate subdirectory.

Documentation