Troubleshooting "No More Processes"

It occasionally happens that the user process table on the NIRSPEC host computer waimea fills up. It's pretty obvious when this happens: nothing works anymore. Observers can't take images, move motors, or do anything. Any attempt to do anything on waimea, even as simple as ls in an xterm, will result in an error like "No more processes."

When this happens, there is only one known cure: reboot. However, when the process table is full, just getting to where you can reboot can take a little doing. Try these two steps, in order:

1. First, Log in to waimea under a different account. The process table is allocated per-user, so you should still be able to log in via a different account:
   • From another machine, telnet waimea
   • At the telnet prompt, log in as teloper
   • Do a soft OA reboot.
2. Second, if you can't get in as teloper, Quit nirspec observing tools until a current waimea window works:
   • From the "Quit" buttons or pulldown menus, try to quit from as many of the NIRSPEC GUIs as you can: XNIRSPEC, QuickLook, EFS GUI, Rotator GUI, Slitmove widget, and anything else that's up.
   • Check an existing terminal window with a waimea> prompt to see if it's working yet.
     • If so, stop the server by issuing the command: waimea> stop_nirspec. Then proceed to do a soft OA reboot by logging in as teloper.
     • If not, use the window manager to kill the window that says "DO_NOT_KILL_THIS_WINDOW," then see if an existing waimea window is working to allow a reboot.