Next Previous Contents

## 2. Requirements

## 2.1 Software and Data Access

The following items must be installed and configured before any of this HOWTO could potentially work for you. Describing the installation of any of these packages is beyond the scope of this document.

- You should be using the Linux operating system, but there is no reason this won't work on Solaris or a BSD variant.
- GEMPAK, for converting the NIDS file format into RASTER
- Some mechanism for NIDS data access
  - Realtime access via UNIDATA IDD using LDM
  - Or FTP access to NIDS files via NOAA
  - Or locally available NIDS files on your hard-drive.
- A webserver, which should be Apache.
- ImageMagick: used to convert the GIF files to TIFF.

The following items will be installed during this howto. The installation of Proj.4 will require privileged access to your system. The Mapserver components will require access to your webserver's CGI-BIN directory.

- Proj.4
- Mapserver
- Simple Mapserver application

## 2.2 Hardware

Hardware requirements is a tricky topic. I have seen 300 MHz machines outperform 1 GHz machines when properly configured. Common sense applies here. If you want to generate nationwide composites every 5 minutes, you will need a healthy machine. If you are supporting a small intranet, a modest machine will do.

For our purposes, Mapserver will not introduce a performance bottleneck on your system. It is extremely fast and robust! Any slowness typically comes when you start reprojecting massive raster layers, but we aren't going to do that!

## 2.3 System Environment

You are going to need root privileges on your system. So either know your root password or be very kind to the system administrator! We will be installing Proj.4 into /usr/local, which is a standard place to put 3rd party software. Mapserver will be installed into the cgi-bin directory of your webserver.

Next Previous Contents