Data Capture Ashore and Serving Overview

Receiving data and messages from vessels

Data from the vessels is sent to the e-mail address data@fleetlink.net. (Data@fleetlink.net delivers to the noppcomm mailinglist on fleetlink, /home/noppc/Mailing-lists/noppcomm. That list consists of noppc@fleetlink.net and data@clearsat.net. Noppc@fleetlink.net delivers to the NOPP Mail Receiver account (noppc) on fleetlink. Messages sent there are currently forwarded to wgwill@clearsat.net, bwrieff@clearsat.net and to rgroman and then are run through procmail. There's a forwarding for rgroman(@fleetlink) which delivers to rgroman@whoi.edu (the IMAP account for RCG).

The procmail utility is invoked automatically and is used to decide where incoming messages will go. Initially, all messaages from the vessel(s) go into the $HOME/Datalog/ directory. Other messages are sent to $HOME/Other_messages/. Once we gain more experience I expect that mail messages destined to be forwarded to other people will automatically be fowarded to the right person by the procmail utility and not end up in $HOME/Other_messages/.

The $HOME/.procmailrc file is the file that procmail looks to for instructions. There are several include files that this file reads in to complete the testing algorithm. It will grow as necessary. These included files are located in the $HOME/Procmail/ directory.

The process_email.pl Perl script is used to scan the $HOME/Datalog/ directory for files to be processed. The perl scripts determine from which vessel the data are from, create or append to the appropriate data files, and move the original data files to the $HOME/Archive_V2 directory (original $HOME/Archive). The script is invoked once an hour using the cron utility once in production mode. If funding permitted, we would telemeter data more frequently each hour and process these files when they came in.

Portland Fish Exchange Data Access

The Portland Fish Exchange data web presence is accessed through a protected web site at http://pfe.fleetlink.net and the data are accessed via http://pfe.fleetlink.net/jg/dir.


Contributed by: R. Groman
Last modified: February 24, 2006