idea for chamber display

[Brendan Kiburg <kiburg@npl.uiuc.edu>]

Hi Fred,	
   We have had a few crashes recently when trying to run the chamber
display program on snake that have caused a serious delay.  Peter waited
about 45 minutes, trying to make contact today.  During this time, the
watchdog functionality was effectively off as the computer was mostly hung
up.

I've come up with a rather unelegant solution to avoid these problems.

On dolphin at ~/daq/slow/chamber-hv/Scripts/ , I have written a simple
perl script that scps the data files from snake to dolphin called
show_chamber_currents.pl . It then runs
root and executes a macro to display the currents based on the local
copy of these files.  It is intended that a user would need to exit root
and rerun the perl script to get an updated version of the files.  The 
normal root session commands could still be executed if one wished to
change the viewing range, but the data would be 'stale'.  This
should avoid compounding the memory leaks that we have, and it should
relieve the load from snake, because its cpu would not be used to run
root, but rather only to scp the files.

At this point, a user needs to enter a password to transfer the files from
snake to dolphin.  I assume that you want to keep it this way to avoid
easy access to the DAQ network from the internet portal.

Is it possible to mount a readonly drive from snake on dolphin?  I could
then simply cp the files to a disk on dolphin and execute the scripts on
this local copy.


If you think of a way to run this more smoothly, please feel free to
suggest it.

I hope your interview went/goes well.
Best Regards,
Brendan