MDM Trouble Report for 2017 Nov 18

Telescope: 1.3m
Observer(s): Halpern (Columbia)
Instrument: Templeton

Problem(s) Encountered:
Shortly after midnight the vnc connection was lost and I was not
able to restart it.  Multiple attempts failed at the stage of
issuing 

x11vnc -display :0 -nomodtweak 

which got stuck and never finished.  Justin came down and
saw that several windows were corrupted, with an 'r' character
repeating endlessly.  These included the TCS control panel, 
an xgterm, and another terminal window.  Since the TCS could
not be used in this condition, and reinitializing the TCS control
panel did not fix it, he rebooted mdm13ws1, which solved the
problem.  He then stowed the telescope, closed the mirror cover
and the dome, just to be safe.  After that, I was able to make
the remote connection, start the OWL, IRAF, and JskyCalc programs,
display the guider PC and other web cameras in my standard
configuration, and start observing again.  Unfortunately I have
no insight as to how the workstation got into this odd state.
Perhaps things that I typed on the screen when it looked
like the vnc connection was lost were really getting in?

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Submitted on 2017 Nov 19 [5:04:25]