• By means of the command "./usermod -u 1001 controls" we set the user ID of the user controls to 1001, as it is supposed to be.
  

• Ottavia was given IP address 131.215.113.097 by editing the file /etc/sysconfig/networ-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 (we also edited the netmask and the gateway address as in the Wiki)
  
• In linux1, which serves as name server, in the directory /var/named/chroot/var/named, we modified both the IP-to-name and name-to-IP register files 131.215.113.in-addr.arpa.zone and 131.215.11in-addr.martian.zone.
  
• We set the file /etc/resolv.conf so that the OS knows who is the name server.
  

• We created locally the empty directories /cvs/cds
  
• We edited the files /etc/fstab adding the line "linux1:/home/cds /cvs/cds nfs rw,bg,soft 0 0"
  
• We implemented the common variables of the controls environment by sourcing the cshrc.40m: in the file /home/controls/.cshrc we added the two lines "source /cvs/cds/caltech/cshrc.40m" and "setenv PATH ${PATH}:/cvs/cds/caltech/apps/linux64/matlab/bin/"
  

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!

So after having broke Allegra by updating the kernel, I was able to get it running again by copying the xorg.conf.backup file over xorg.conf in /etc/X11.  So at this point in time, Allegra is running with generic video drivers, as opposed to the ATI specific and proprietary drivers.

c1susvme1 is behaving weirdly.  I've restarted it several times but its computation time is hanging out around 260 usec, making it useless for suspension control and locking.  I also found a PS/2 keyboard plugged in, which doesn't work, so I unplugged it.  It needs to be plugged into a PS/2 keyboard/mouse Y-splitter cable. 

 Kiwamu and I brought 2 SUPER MICRO PCs from Willson house into 40m.

Both PCs are hooked up into Martian network. One is named as bscteststand for BSC which has been set up by Cds people and another one is named kami1 for temporary use for CLIO which is a bland new, no operating installed PC. This bland new PC will be returned Cds or 40m once another new PC which we will order within several days arrives.

IP address for each machine is 131.215.113.83 and 131.215.113.84 respectively.

We have installed CentOS5.2 into the new PC.

#!/bin/csh -f
setenv POSIXLY_CORRECT
while (! { ezcawrite.bin $* })
      echo "Retry $0 $*"
end

I added the following repos which I found on allegra to megatron and then did a 'yum install sshfs' on both machines:

allegra:yum.repos.d>l
total 28
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  428 Feb 12 16:47 rpmforge.repo
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  684 Feb 12 16:47 mirrors-rpmforge
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1054 Feb 12 16:47 epel-testing.repo
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  954 Feb 12 16:47 epel.repo
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  626 Feb 12 16:47 CentOS-Media.repo
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1869 Feb 12 16:47 CentOS-Base.repo
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  179 Feb 12 16:47 adobe-linux-i386.repo

This also required me to import the rpmforge GPG key:

sudo rpm --import http://dag.wieers.com/rpm/packages/RPM-GPG-KEY.dag.txt

I found that tdsdata doesn't work.

When I star tdsdata, he takes a few ~ 10 seconds of data, and he dies with a message "Segmentation fault".
I tried to get data for some times and some channels, and this problem was observed everytime.
I also tried tdsdata on allegra, op440m and mafalda, and it didn't work on all of them.

Yesterday, I got a new version of tdsdata (which modified the problem of Message ID: 1328) and tried to build 
thme on my directory (/cvs/cds/caltech/users/kakeru.....)
This may have some relation to this problem.

restartFE c1lsc

restartFE c1lsc c1asc c1susvme1

restartFE all

fb:controls>./tpman &
[1] 1037
fb:controls>VMIC RFM 5565 (0) found, mapped at 0x2868c90
VMIC RFM 5579 (1) found, mapped at 0x2868c90
Could not open 5565 reflective memory in /dev/daqd-rfm1
16 kHz system
Spawn testpoint manager
Channel list length for node 0 is 4168
Test point manager (31001001 / 1): node 0

After the boot-fest, the nightly backup to Powell-Booth failed, and an automatic email got sent to me. I restarted the ssh agent, following the instructions in /cvs/cds/caltech/scripts/backup/000README.txt .

Because of the network interference we've had from the CLIO system for the past 3-4 days, I asked the guys to remove

the test stand from the 40m lab area. It is now in the 40m control room. Since it needed an ethernet connection to get out

for some reason we've let them hook into GC. Also, instead of using a real timing signal slaved to the GPS, Jay suggested

just skipping it and having the Timing Slave talk to itself by looping back the fiber with the timing signal. Osamu will enter

more details, but this is just to give a status update.

This morning there was a confliction of tpman running on fb40m and kami1. Alex fixed it temporary but Rana suggested it was better to move both PCs outside martian. We moved both PCs physically to the control room and connected to general network with a local router. I believe it won't conflict anymore but if you guess these PC might have trouble please feel free to shutdown.

Today's work summary:

 *connected expansion chassis to bscteststand

 *obtained signals on dataviewer, dtt for both realtime and past data on bscteststand with 64kHz timing signal

Questions:

Excitation channels are not shown, only "other" is shown.

qts.mdl should run with 16kHz but 16kHz timing causes a slow speed on dataviewer and failing data aquisition on dtt. We are using 64kHz timing but is it really correct?

We found c1lsc, c1iscex, c1iscey, c1susvme, c1asc and c1sosvme are dead.
We  turned off all watchdogs and turned off all lock of suspensions.
Then, I tried to reboot these machines from terminal, but I couldn't login to all of these machines.

So, we turned off and on key switches of these machines physically, and login to them to run startup scripts.

Then we turned on all watchdogs and restored all IFO.

Now they look like they are working fine.
 

I tried to play an .avi file on allegra. In a normal universe this would be easy, but because its linux I was foiled.

The default video player (Totem) doesn't play .avi or .wmv format. The patches for this work in Suse but not Fedora. Kubuntu but not CentOS, etc.I also tried installing Kplayer, Kaffeine, mplayer, xine, Aktion, Realplay, Helix, etc. They all had compatibility issues with various things but usuallylibdvdread or some gstreamer plugin.So I pressed the BIG update button. This has now started and allegra may never recover. The auto update wouldn't work in default mode becauseof the libdvdread and gstreamer-ugly plugins, so I unchecked those boxes. I think we're going to have this problem as long as we used any kind ofadvanced gstreamer stuff for the GigE cameras (which is unavoidable).

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.

nodus was hanging because it was trying to mount the cit40m account from rigel and rigel was not responding.

Neither I nor Yoichi can recall what the cit40m account does for us on nodus anymore and so I commented it out of the nodus /etc/vfstab.

nodus may still need a boot to make it pay attention. I was unable to do a 'umount' to get rid of the rigel parasite. But mainly I don't want anything in

the 40m to depend on the LIGO GC system if at all possible.

We successfully compiled and installed the Real time Code Generator "Hello World" example (which is a skeleton for the ETMX suspension controller) on megatron.  In order to get it to compile, we had to add a flag indicating the computer is stand alone, and not using a myrinet card at the moment.  This was done by adding the shmem_daq = 1 flag to the cdsParameters module.  The symptom was it was unable to find gm.h (and there is no installed /opt/gm directory).

It is called "sam".  It was installed to /cvs/cds/caltech/target/sam, and produced medm screens in /cvs/cds/caltech/medm/c1/sam.  As nothing points to these, I figure it won't harm any of the current configuration, but lets us play around a bit.  If by some strange reason, these do cause problems, feel free to remove them.

#
# Script to backup via rsync the most recent 40m minute trends and
# any changes to the /cvs/cds filesystem.
#
50 05 * * * /cvs/cds/caltech/scripts/backup/rsync.backup < /dev/null > /cvs/cds/caltech/scripts/\
backup/rsync.backup.log 2>&1

30 06 * * * find /usr/controls/jobs -mtime +7 -exec /bin/rm -f {} \;

Having determined that Rana (the computer) was having to many issues with testing the new Raid array due to age of the system, we proceeded to test on fb40m.

We brought it down and up several times between 11 and noon.  We  eventually were able to daisy chain the old raid and the new raid so that fb40m sees both.  At this time, the RAID arrays are still daisy chained, but the computer is setup to run on just the original raid, while the full 14 TB array is initialized (16 drives, 1 hot spare, RAID level 5 means 14 TB out of the 16 TB are actually available).  We expect this to take a few hours, at which point we will copy the data from the old RAID to the new RAID (which I also expect to take several hours).  In the meantime, operations should not be affected.  If it is, contact one of us.

This afternoon the alignment script chrashed after returning sysntax errors. We found that the tpman wasn't running on the framebuilder becasue it had probably failed to get restarted in one of the several reboots executed in the morning by Alex and Jo.

Restarting the tpman was then sufficient for the alignment scripts to get back to work.