Troubleshooting guide
II.Starting FLAMINGOS
When you arrive at the 2.1-m telescope, you may have to bring up the FLAMINGOS windows and initialize the
system (this should have been done during the checkout night). The initial steps of this procedure will
hopefully only need to be done once at the beginning of your run; however, you may need to repeat this process
during the course of your observing time if you get logged out, or if the system crashes.
The observer interface at the 2.1-m has been significantly upgraded. There are two MacMini computers,
second-1 and second-2, each with two 24-inch monitors, which act as observer interfaces to the telescope and
instrument computers. As before, FLAMINGOS is run from an ssh session and can be run from either
MacMini. Since second-1 is the primary interface for running the telescope, if there are two observers, one
might choose to run FLAMINGOS from second-2. A solo observer can run both the telescope and
FLAMINGOS from second-1, but cannot run the telescope from second-2. There are four desktops (called
spaces) on the second-1/2 monitors; moving the mouse to the top right of the right-hand monitor or the bottom
left of the left-hand monitor will give a bird's-eye view of all four spaces and can pick one of them with the
mouse. This is a convenient feature, which some might find annoying when it occurs without warning.
IMPORTANT: The linux computer sapphire, which had been used for backing up data from flamingos1a
using the autocopy script, is now a critical systems machine for the telescope and is now unavailable for the
backup function. Either second-1 or second-2 may be used for the offloading of FLAMINGOS data using the
mirror script described below and subsequent analysis with IRAF and archiving to DVD or USB hard drive.
The most welcome change is that any of the FLAMINGOS (or other) windows can be moved between the two
monitors, eliminating the annoying display environment statements during startup. In addition, one can ssh to
the FLAMINGOS computer from second-1/2 without specifying a login name or password.
Furthermore, some of the commands which do not require arguments may now be run from a menu on the
second1/2 desktop, which can be brought up by double-clicking on the FLAMINGOS icon on the desktop.
For the examples here, we will assume two observers, one running the telescope from second-1, the other
running FLAMINGOS from second-2. The full startup procedure follows:
1. Log on to second-2. Choose the 2meter icon; the password ____________[taped to the monitor]
2. Once the desktop has come up, open a terminal from the icons at the bottom of the screen
3. In the window, ssh into the FLAMINGOS control computer, hereafter known as flamingos1a, as 2mguest:
% ssh flmn-2m-1a
(It is no longer necessary to specify the login name 2mguest or the password).
4. Start the FLAMINGOS windows in the ssh window which opens. Note one can move them freely between
the two monitors
2mguest@flmn-2m-1a{1} ds9 &
2mguest@flmn-2m-1a{2} xgterm -T IRAF_Flamingos -n IRAF_Flamingos &
In the xgterm you just opened start IRAF in the correct directory:
2mguest@flmn-2m-1a{3} cd ~; cd Iraf; cl
FLAMINGOS@2.1-m, Ver. 2.39, 2011 May 13 Page 8 of 46