Expanding GRASS - Questions

[Schmidt]

At 11:08 AM 5/9/97 EDT, you wrote:
>Hello,
>
>I've been using the GRASS GIS for a number of years now and have been
constantly
>amazed, and amazed other people, that such a great bit of software is available
>for free. However, I'm beginning to reach the edges of GRASS's capabilities as
>my managers are asking me to convert the R&D work I've done with GRASS into
>fully functional systems that can be used by a number of people in my office. I
>realise that GRASS was designed to be used a research tool rather than a
>corporate GIS like Arc/Info, however I was wondering if and how anybody has
>compiled GRASS to run over a network where you can:
>        - Have multiple users using the same GRASS binaries?
>        - Have a user running multiple GRASS sessions at the same time and on
>the same or different database?
>        - Allow multiple users to access the same database at the same time
>(though with read / write options controlled by the system administrator)?
>
>Also, I know this is an oldie but I can't remember the answer, has anyone
solved
>the x-monitor problem of only being able to have one working x-monitor? (If I
>fire up two x-monitors only one displays the full colour range - the other one
>goes grey).
>
>Thanks in advance for any responses.
>
>Alastair Duncan,
>GIS Applications Scientist,
>National Centre for Environmental Data and Surveillance,
>Environment Agency,
>Bath, UK.
>
>

I've been using GRASS for several years in a networked Linux environment. I
have the GRASS binary on a single machine. The other machines on the network
are set up to NFS mount the GRASS directory. I also have several GRASS
Locations set up on the same machine. The PERMANENT mapsets are readable by
all users and can be used by any number of users at the same time. Each user
establishes his own GRASS locations under his home directory, but uses
symbolic links to the PERMANENT mapsets on the server.  
I did have to create the fifo files on each machine on the network and set
up the monitorcap file so that it pointed to a directory on each machine
rather than an NFS directory.

Jim Schmidt
GIS Instructor
Columbia College
Sonora, California
avenues at sonnet.com