Contents:
IRAF can use one of three methods to commuicate
with DS9: fifo, socket, and unix domain name. The DS9 defaults are:
An IRAF image server (XIMTOOL,
SAOIMAGE, DS9,
etc...) uses a configuration file to specify the number of available
buffers and their sizes. What actually passes from IRAF is not the
buffer size, but an index number into this file.
So when an image server starts (DS9), it will attempt to locate this file as .imtoolrc and /usr/local/lib/imtoolrc. If not found, it will look for shell environment varibles FBCONFIG_ENV1 and FBCONFIG_ENV2, that contains the name of the configuration file.
If no configuration file is found, the image server can only assume a 512x512 buffer. If on the other hand, IRAF assumes a different buffer size, the image will appear corrupted and DS9 may issue a number of error messages.
Another problem is that this file must be in sync with dev$graphcap. If your system administrator has made changes to graphcap, they must also be implemented in imtoolrc.