ERROR: Write to IPC with no reader - saoimage

John Ouellette wrote on Aug 25, 1999

Hi,

I'm trying to figure out the source of a problem we're having with our
IRAF system.  The problem is that
when some users attempt to display an image using SAOimage, they get the
error

ERROR: Write to IPC with no reader

and saoimage crashes.   With SAOtng the error is somewhat different: it
complains about attempts
to write outside of array bounds e.g.:

ximtool: attempted write out of bounds on framebuf
write 16384 bytes at [0,1272]

A workaround, which I'm not entirely happy with, is for each user to
copy /iraf/iraf/dev/imtoolrc
to their home directory as .imtoolrc.  This gets rid of the errors, but
obviously means that IRAF is
not correctly finding this file in /iraf/iraf/dev.

Is there a problem with our system that I 'm missing?

John Ouellette

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Mike Fitzpatrick wrote on Aug 25, 1999

> I'm trying to figure out the source of a problem we're having with our
> IRAF system.  The problem is that when some users attempt to display an
> image using SAOimage, they get the error
> 
> ERROR: Write to IPC with no reader
> 
> and saoimage crashes.   With SAOtng the error is somewhat different: it
> complains about attempts to write outside of array bounds e.g.: ....

	The ultimate cause is that you don't have a /usr/local/lib/imtoolrc
link on the system.  This is created at the time the iraf install script
is run as as a symlink to $iraf/dev/imtoolrc, but only if the /usr/local/lib
directory already exists on the machine.  Without the file display servers
like saoimage/saotng can only use a 512x512 frame buffer, if you use
something larger on the iraf side you get the "attempt to write out of
bounds" errors.  The actual cause of the "Write to IPC with no reader" is
that saoimage crashed, not the other way around.
	Since display servers can be used on a system with no iraf at all
they don't look specifically for a dev$imtoolrc file, but something either
in a system directory like /usr/local/lib or in the user's home directory.
All you need to do is

	# ln -s /iraf/iraf/dev/imtoolrc /usr/local/lib/imtoolrc

to set the link on your machine and fix the problem.

Cheers,
Mike Fitzpatrick

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Last post on Aug 25, 1999