Re: st: Sharing ado files on a network

[Richard Williams <Richard.A.Williams.5@nd.edu>]

At 02:33 PM 1/22/2004 -0500, Richard Williams wrote:
> My students are using Stata this semester, and I want them to be able to 
> use various user-written programs.  Apparently, however, they could 
> install stuff on cluster machines, but it would be gone the next day.  The 
> network administrator is willing to install some stuff permanently, but I 
> don't want to be harassing him every week as I figure out what I want!
>
> Students do, however, have networked drives they have regular read/write 
> access to (on our system, the H: drive).
Thanks to Nick, Paul, Alan and others for their excellent advice on this 
problem.  I am still working on the optimal strategy, but I plan to do 
something like this.  I have written a file called 
-mystata.do-.  Currently, it looks like this:

* These commands personalize your Stata directories
sysdir set OLDPLACE H:\ado
sysdir set PERSONAL H:\ado\personal
sysdir set PLUS H:\ado\plus
* This will run your personal profile.do if you have one.
capture run H:\ado\personal\profile.do
* You can add any other startup commands below or in your profile.do file

This will send any downloaded programs to the students own H: drive (where 
they won't get deleted) and run the students' own -profile.do- if they have 
one (the capture command will avoid the students seeing an error message if 
they don't have a -profile.do- file).

If I could get the network administrators to go along, I would make this 
the -profile.do- file on every cluster machine and have it run 
automatically (or at least have an ado-file version of this that anyone 
could execute by typing -mystata-).  Since getting such cooperation may be 
easier said than done, I may just mail the program to my students, tell 
them to place it in H:\; and then when they start Stata, type

run H:\mystata

Also, I may consider the advice to set up a site of shared files, e.g.

sysdir set SITE whateveritis

If I do this, I would probably suggest that students add this to their own 
-profile.do-, as I wouldn't want everybody on campus using this directory!

Thanks again for all the help!  This is a less painful process than I 
thought it would be.  Rich

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