FB40m up and running again after restarting the DAQ.

We can't read minute trends from either Dataviewer or loadLIGOData from before 11am this morning. 

fb:/frames>du -skh minute-trend-frames/
 106G   minute-trend-frames


So the frames are still on the disk.  We just can't get them with our usual tools (NDS).

 Trying to read 60 days of minute trends from C1:PSL-PMC_TRANSPD yields:

Connecting to NDS Server fb40m (TCP port 8088)
Connecting.... done
258.0 minutes of trend displayed
read(); errno=9
read(); errno=9
T0=09-06-06-22-34-02; Length=5184000 (s)
No data output.


Trying to read 3 seconds of full data works.

Second trends are readable after about 4am UTC this morning, which is about 9 pm last night.

 Yesterday Alex started transferring the data records to the new storage unit. That prevented us from accessing the trends for a fe hours.

The process had been completed and now we can read the trends again.

Alberto, Kiwamu, Koji,

this morning we found the RFM network and all the front-ends down.

To fix the problem, we first tried a soft strategy, that is, we tried to restart CODAQCTRL and C1DCUEPICS alone, but it didn't work.

We then went for a big bootfest. We first powered off fb40m, C1DCUEPICS, CODAQCTRL, reset the RFM Network switch. Then we rebooted them in the same order in which we turned them off.

Then we power cycled and restarted all the front-ends.

Finally we restored all the burt snapshots to Monday Dec 7th at 20:00.

[Alberto, Koji, Rana]

The RFM network failed today. We had to reboot the frame builder anf restart all the front end following the instructions for the "Nuclear Option".

Burt-restoring to May 1st at 18:07, or April 30 18:07 made c1sosvme crash. We had to reset the front ends again and restore to April 15th at 18:07 in order to make everything work.

Everything seems fine again now.

Alex wrote a new code to implement LSP noise generator. The code is based on 64 bit random number generator from Numerical Recipes 3rd ed ch 7.1 (p 343).

Joe made two instances in the LSP model.

The attached plot shows the spectra and coherence of two generators. The incoherence is ~1/Navg - statistically consistent with no coherence.

I was getting an excess noise in the C1:IOO-MC_DRUM1 channel - it was a flat spectrum of 10 cts/rHz (corresponding to 600 uV/rHz).

I tried a few things, but eventually had to power cycle the crate with c1iovme in order to recover the standard ADC noise level of 3x10^-3 cts/rHz with a 1/sqrt(f) knee at 10 Hz.

I checked the gain of the channel by injecting a 2 Vpp sine wave at 137.035 Hz. 2Vpp as measured on a scope gives 31919 cts instead of the expected 32768, giving a 2.5% error from what we would have naively calculated.

Even so, the noise in this channel is very surprisingly good: 0.003 / (31919 / 2) = 187 nV /rHz.  The best noise I have previously seen from an ICS-110B channel is 800 nV/rHz. What's going on here?

we had to reboot the IOO VME crate right before lunch as the DAQ wasn't working correct meaning showing no real signals anymore, only strange noise. The framebuilder and everything else was working fine at that time.

• The channel used for the phase noise measurement stopped showing any useful signal right after midnight, so all the other IOO-MC signals.
  
• The data taken with those channels showed something like a 140 counts or so of steady offset with something which looked like the last bit fluctuating.
  
• Whatever signal we connected to the input it didn't change at all, floating/shorted input, sine wave etc.
• the other channels for the MC which we checked showed the same strange behaviour
  

As the other channels showed the same effect we decided to reboot the crate and everything was fine afterwards.

I notice that Megatron is slower than any other computer in running code that invokes optickle or looptickle (i.e. three times slower than Ottavia). Even without the graphics.

Has anyone ever experienced that?

Symptoms:  Belladonna could not (for a while) connect to the wireless network, since there was a driver problem for the wireless card.  This (I believe) started when Yoichi was doing updates on it a while back.

The system: Belladonna is a Dell Inspirion E1505 laptop, with a Broadcom Corporation Dell Wireless 1390 WLAN Mini-PCI Card (rev 01)

Result:  Belladonna now can talk to it's wireless card, and is connected to the Martian network.  (MEDM and Dataviewer both work, so it must be on the network.)

What I did:

0.  Find a linux forum with the following method:  http://www.thelinuxpimp.com/main/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=749

The person who wrote this has the exact same laptop, with the same wireless card.

1.  Get a new(er) version of ndiswrapper, which "translates" the Windows Driver for the wireless card to Linux-ese.  Belladonna previously was using ndiswrapper-1.37.

$wget http://nchc.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/ndiswrapper/ndiswrapper-1.42.tar.gz

2.  Put the ndiswrapper in /home/controls/Drivers, and installed it.

$ndiswrapper -i bcmwl5.inf  3.  Get and put the Windows driver in /home/controls/Drivers/WiFi

$wget http://ftp.us.dell.com/network/R140747.EXE

4.  Unzip the driver

$unzip -a R140747.EXE

5.  Make Fedora use ndiswrapper

$ndiswrapper -m

$modprobe ndiswrapper

6. Change some files to make everything work:

/etc/sysconfig/wpa_supplicant      CHANGE FROM: DRIVERS="-Dndiswrapper"     CHANGE TO: DRIVERS="-Dwext"

/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-wlan0      CHANGE FROM: BOOTPROTO=none      CHANGE TO: BOOTPROTO=dhcp

/etc/rc.d/init.d/wpa_supplicant        CHANGE FROM: daemon $prog -c $conf $INTERFACES $DRIVERS -B        CHANGE TO: daemon $prog -c$conf $INTERFACES $DRIVERS -B

6.  Restart things

$service wpa_supplicant restart
$service network restart

7.  Restart computer (since it wasn't working after 1-6, so give a restart a try)

8. Success!!!  MEDM and Dataviewer work without any wired internet connection => wireless card is all good again!

I really don't understand why my programs that I used to use to get data from the HP Spectrum Analyzer and the Marconi frequency generator don't work anymore.

I spent hours trying to debug the code but I can't sort the problem out.

The main problem seem to be with the function recv from the socket library. Somehow it can't anymore get any data from the instruments. The thing I can't understand, though, is that if called directly from the python terminal it works fine!

In particular the problem is with the following lines in my code:

netSock.send("mkpk;mka?\n")
netSock.send("++read eoi\n")
tmp = netSock.recv(1024)

Tried a lot of tickering but it didn't work.

I attach the two scripts I've been using. One (sweepfrequencyPRC.py) calls the other (HP4395PRC.py).

They worked egregiously for weeks in the past. Don't know what happened since then.

This morning Joe looked at my code and made me notice that for some reason the query to the Spectrum Analyzer made by netSock.recv(1024) contained two answers. It was like the buffer contained the answer two different queries.

After some experiment I found that basically the GPIB interface wasn't switching from the "auto 1" to the "auto 0" mode as it should. I rewrote part of the code and that seemed have solved the problem.

Still don't understand why it used to work in the past and then it stopped.

I was told that, as of last weekend, we now have the capability to save full data for a month, whereas before it was something like 3 days. However, my attempts to get the data from the accidentally-shorted EW2 channel in the Guralp box have all been epic failures. My other data is okay, despite my not saving it for several days after it was recorded. So, my question is, how long can the data actually be saved, and when did the saving capability change?

Alberto, Steve,

While I was moving a cart near by the PSL table I pushed the red emergency button that turns off the PSL laser. We had to unlock the button and then power cycle the laser driver to turn the laser back on.

I relocked MZ, FSS, PMC and I'm now waiting for the power to finish ramping up back to the previous value.

Yesterday Rana and I needed some room on the white board in the Control Room. We had to erase some of the stuff present on the board despite the bif warning "Do Not Erase".

This is how it looked like before erasing.

This afternoon I inadvertently disconnected one of the power cables coming from the power supply on the floor next to the OMC cabinet and going to the DCPD Interface Box.

Rob reconnected the cable as it was before.

This morning, after Steve pointed out that the readout RFAMPD_DC was zero, I thought of realigning the beam on the photodiode. Maybe I touched the lens or the beam splitter that send the beam on the diode when I installed an other beam splitter to make the measurement of the calibration between two ThorLabs PDA255 photodiodes.

After aligning the beam on the RFAMPD, the voltage of the DC readout was lower than it used to be (C1:IOO-RFAMPD_DC ~ 0.4 now vs. 4 as it was on November 4th).

I maximized the DC readout but the problem seems to be that the beam spot is not a round TEM00. In particular the spot looks like that of a TEM10 mode.

Since we're looking at the MC transmitted beam, is it possible that the MC is locked on the wrong mode?

Check out the attached picture.

 Instead of doing RCG stuff, I went to Millikan to work on data analysis as I couldn't stand the fumes from the construction.  (this morning, 8am) 

 Diesel fumes are pumped away from control room AC intakes  with the help of newly installed  reflector boxes on the CES wall  fans.........see # 2272

A poor lonely SR785 was found this morning roaming around in the lab in evident violation of the fundamental rule which requires all the equipment on carts to be brought back inside the lab right after use.

The people and the professors related to the case should take immediate action to repair for their misdeed.

We're going to have to reinstate the policy of No food / organic trash *anywhere* in the 40m.  Everyone has been pretty good, keeping the food trash to the one can right next to the sink, but that is no longer sufficient, since we've been invaded by an army of ants:

We are going back to the old policy of Take your trash out to the dumpsters outside.  I'm sure there are some old wives tales about how exercise after eating helps your digestion, or something like that, so no more laziness allowed!

 One day I'll get to be part of the krew

This totally creeped me out when I found it wandering around on the floor not so far from my desk:

I found this very interesting German maker of cool cable cutting tools. It's called Jokari.

We should keep it as a reference for the future if we want to buy something like that, ie RF coax cable cutting knives.

http://www.jokari.de/en.htm

Yeah, this looks nice.

And I also like to have something I have attached. This is "HOZAN P-90", but we should investigate American ones
so that we can cut the wires classified by AWG.

SVN down

mafalda down

I am guessing that the NFS file system hangup may have caused some machines to get into an awkward state. We may be best off doing a controlled power cycle of everything...

svn is back after starting apache on nodus.

http://lhocds.ligo-wa.caltech.edu:8000/40m/ApacheOnNodus

mafalda is up now.

I found that the cable for mafalda (the sole red cable) had a broken latch.
The cable was about falling off from the switch. As a first-aid, I used this technique to put a new latch, and put it into the switch.

Now I can logged in it. I did not rebooted it.

Prof Alan Weistein guided the 24 student through the 40m. His performance was rated as  an enthusiastic 9.5

DTT stopped working for recent data. An 'ls' in the frames/full/ directory reveals:

drwxr-xr-x 2 controls controls 258048 Feb  3 12:26 9807
drwxr-xr-x 2 controls controls 258048 Feb  4 16:13 9808
drwxr-xr-x 2 controls controls 262144 Feb  5 19:59 9809
drwxr-xr-x 2 controls controls 258048 Feb  6 23:46 9810
drwxr-xr-x 2 controls controls 258048 Feb  8 03:33 9811
drwxr-xr-x 2 controls controls 262144 Feb  9 07:19 9812
drwxr-xr-x 2 controls controls 253952 Feb 10 11:06 9813
drwxr-xr-x 2 controls controls 266240 Feb 11 14:53 9814
drwxr-xr-x 2 controls controls 266240 Feb 12 18:39 9815
drwxr-xr-x 2 controls controls 266240 Feb 13 22:26 9816
drwxr-xr-x 2 controls controls 262144 Feb 15 02:13 9817
drwxr-xr-x 2 controls controls 253952 Feb 16 05:59 9818
drwxr-xr-x 2 controls controls 241664 Feb 17 09:46 9819
drwxr-xr-x 2 controls controls  28672 Feb 17 12:22 9820
drwxr-xr-x 2 controls controls  32768 Feb 17 15:06 6663
drwxr-xr-x 2 controls controls  73728 Feb 17 23:39 6664
controls@fb /frames/full $ date
Thu Feb 17 23:39:27 PST 2011

Today we tried the Schmitt trigger DFD, and while it works it does not improve the noise performance.  At least part of our problem is coming from the discrete nature of our DFD algorithm, so I would propose that an industrious day job person codes up a new DFD which avoids switching.  We can probably do this by mixing the input signal (after high-passing) with a time-delayed copy of itself... as we do now, but without the comparator.  This has the disadvantage of giving an amplitude dependent output, but since we are working in the digital land we can DIVIDE.  If we mix the signal with itself (without delay) to get a rectified version, and low-pass it a little, we can use this for normalization.  The net result should be something like:

output = LP2[ s(t) * s(t - dt) / LP1[ s(t) * s(t) ]],

where s(t) is the high-passed input and LP is a low-pass filter.  Remember not to divide by zero.

I modified the c1gfd.mdl simulink model.  I made a backup as c1gfd_20110325.mdl. 

The first change was to use a top_names block to put everything in.  The block is labeled ALS.  So all the channels will now be C1:ALS-GFD_SOMETHING.  This means medm channel names will need to be updated.  Also, the filter modules need to be updated in foton because of this.

I then proceeded to add the suggested changes made by Matt.  To avoid a divide by zero case, I added a saturation part which saturates at 1e-9 (note this is positive) and 1e9.

Suresh is captivating his audience with gravity waves on last Friday, March 25

.....Happy.... Birthday.... to.... Joseph... and... Jamie...Happy....Birthday..... to.... You............sing with us........Happy Birthday.....to you

The little red all terrain cargo wagon 40" x 18"  has just arrived on pneumatic wheels.

Model #29, 200 lbs max load at 26 PSI,  minimum age requirement 1.5 years

An error this evening on rossa: dataviewer not working due to some font errors:

controls@rossa:~ 0$ dataviewer
Connecting.... done
Warning: Not all children have same parent in XtManageChildren
Warning: Not all children have same parent in XtManageChildren
Warning: Not all children have same parent in XtManageChildren
Warning: Not all children have same parent in XtManageChildren
Warning: Not all children have same parent in XtManageChildren
Warning:
    Name: FilterText
    Class: XmTextField
    Character '\52' not supported in font.  Discarded.

Warning:
    Name: FilterText
    Class: XmTextField
    Character '\56' not supported in font.  Discarded.

Warning:
    Name: FilterText
    Class: XmTextField
    Character '\170' not supported in font.  Discarded.

Warning:

etc.............

If I catch anyone putting small booties into the large bootie bin, I will make said person eat small booties.

 I propose we work around this problem with giant flip-flops.  These are in the vein of the take-off-your-shoes-and-put-on-Crocs, without the taking off your shoes part.  They're a little annoying on the sticky mats, but otherwise great.  They are also super easy to put on and take off without hands, so there's no excuse for wearing them around the control room. 

I propose we buy many pairs of the smalls in green (since we already have one green small...they are big on me, so should be just right for most people), and a few mediums in, say, blue, and a few larges in black, and then maybe a few extra larges in green for people with extraordinarily large feet (they only have 3 colors).  Then we can keep a few pairs of each by each door to the lab, and have no more tracking dirty control room filth into the lab.

 I would like to suggest a trial run on these....Ergomates and the cleanboot!

REPLY by JCD:  Are these going to trap dirt and be impossible to clean though?  The nice thing about Crocs and the giant flip flops is that they are solid and if they get dirty you can do a quick wipedown, and they're good as new.

 The Cleanboot is washable and reusable!