Using the I.R. Camera system

System Components:

The I.R. Camera computer system consists of 3 primary computers, networked together by Ethernet.  These are functionally identified as follows: The Sun Workstation is located in the observing room, and will be used by most users to access their data.  It does not control the observing, but the data output by the observing process is put on the disks of this workstation.

The telescope data acquisition computer is located in an equipment rack on the observing floor, and is normally controled remotely from the Sun Workstation.  It runs a program which accepts commands from the Camera Control computer and writes observed data onto the disks of the Sun Workstation; it is the interface to the camera electronics.

The Camera Control computer is located in the equipment rack in the observing room, and is used by the observer to command the observing process.

The Sun Workstation:

This workstation is used to interact with data, and may be used to control the data acquisition computer remotely.  The user or observer will log in with a user name and password to be supplied.  There are 3 data disks each holding about 30 Gigabytes of data, please use care to efficiently manage this storage, and back up the data properly.  Clean your data off the system when you leave, so there will be space for the next observer.
 

Controlling the data acquisition computer remotely:

Since the data acquisition computer is on the observing floor, it is normally accessed remotely using the "VNC" program - which is documented on the web.  The VNC system comprises 2 programs, a "server" which runs on the computer being viewed remotely, and a client or "viewer" which is run on the computer where the user views the remote computer.  In the case of this I.R. Camera data acquisition computer, the "server" program is always running, as it is installed automatically at boot time.  The viewer is started to actually view the computer screen remotely.  Since this may be done by any computer on the Internet, the session is password protected.

When using the I.R. Camera system's Sun workstation, the special command "vnc" is defined to start the VNC viewer, and connect to the server on the data acquisition computer.  For those who need to access this service from other workstations on the net, the proper node name and password may be provided.

Please note that the window from which you start the viewer (by the "vnc" command or otherwise) will have its keyboard activity used for viewer window interaction, so it will not be independently usable for the duration of the viewer session.  It is not useful to try to run the viewer in the background.

While the viewer session is active, keyboard input to the viewing computer is passed to the viewed computer, as are mouse movements and clicks.  The screen also changes in (nearly) real time, and the result is almost like being at the console of the remote computer.  There are a few limitations imposed by the operating systems, for example the control-alt-del key combination cannot be passed to a Windows-95 system via VNC.