MDM Trouble Report for 2007 Sep 7

Telescope: 2.4m
Observer(s): Atlee & Eastman (OSU)
Instrument: CCDS + RETROCAM

Problem(s) Encountered:
We encountered five minor software bugs tonight:

1)
TCSLink  down  in Prospero:

On startup, Prospero issues this warning:

*** WARNING: The TCS interface agent is up, but
   it reports that its communications link with
   the telescope controller proper is down.
 Suggestions:
   1) Check that the TCS proper (not the agent)
      is running and ready for remote commands.
   2) Use the TCINIT command to restart the TCS
      interface link, then TCSTATUS to verify
      the link integrity.
 Note that on most systems a disabled TCS link
 provides correct time/date for FITS headers but
 nothing else.

We tried a TCINIT, restarting everything, and even rebooting the TCS. When none of those worked, we called Bob, who said he noticed it too, but it appeared that everything was being correctly written to the files (LST, RA, DEC, and even TCSLINK=Active).

2)
We encountered the unique name bug once during the night during normal CCDS observations. While in and of itself, it is harmless, the warning is harsh and the observer will probably waste a large amount of time trying to figure out what went wrong.

3)
Something is really messed up with the directory structure of hiltner. Every folder in the /home directory except agung is 0 bytes, and when I try to ls retrocam or vesubius, the terminal hangs for about 15 seconds and finally returns  ls: retrocam: No such file or directory .
Probably related, there is a note attached to the retrocam documentation that says

Until further notice!!!
To Start RETROCAM, the hiltner observer needs to:
1) open an xterm and ssh to agung
2) once in agung, type  start_retrocam 

without further explanation. Can someone tell me what's going on here? I can't find any of the retrocam scripts and the standard data directories apparently don't exist anymore.

4)
Retrocam died when I gave it a  DataDir  that didn't exist.

5)
In prospero, if the filename is specified with caps (filename TEST) the next image field displays  test  while the last image field properly displays  TEST .



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Submitted on 2007 Sep 8 [7:02:30]
NOTE: This trouble report replaces the previous report for 2007 Sep 7