Problem(s) Encountered:

For some reason Owl stopped responding to the  expose  command at the start of the night -- I'd been power-cycling the controller, which might have confused it? I stopped Owl to restart it, but the windows did not go away -- they went blank.  Then I couldn't get input into other windows to work (though I did have the mouse).  So, I tried exiting the vnc connection.  But then I couldn't get the VNC to reconnect!  I did still have my terminal connection.

I called Eric and he saved the situation by taking mdm13ws1 down to clear any connections and setting me up on mdm13ws2, which worked fine for the rest of the night.  ws1 has an issue right now where it won't reboot without someone present to hit a key, so this was the easiest way to get going. 

The telescope was open and tracking while I could not control it.  Fortunately, the weather was ecxcellent, but I got to thinking that it would be good to have a text-only command to run the closing sequence from a terminal in case of a vnc failure.

Solution:

Not really sure what happened, but things got screwy.  I tend to warn people away from the software cycling of the camera controllers in Owl.  I’ve seen weird unintended results from time to time that end up requiring hard reboots.  Thankfully that was not necessary here.
mdm13ws1 requires the F1 key be struck at some point in the boot process.  I was hoping this was due to the on-board battery being dead, so I switched it out today.  No luck.  Still have to hit F1 when rebooting this machine.