Background

Most of the problems at night do not require to restart all AO tools. Any operation tool can be killed/quit manually and then be restarted from the pulldown.

Most problems at acquisition time may be fixed by quitting and restarting the AO acquisition widget.

Contents

• Problems with IDL tool

Problems with IDL tools

• If an IDL tool crashes, please copy the error message from the IDL session and put it in the nightlog. Kill the IDL tool in question by typing exit in the corresponding IDL terminal and restart it. Do not waste time trying to find what the problem was, it may well be a network problem. It is always best to type exit in the IDL xterm so that we can find out about the bug by checking the IDL journal the next morning.
• Restart the IDL tool. From the workspace pulldown options, under AO tools, select IDL tool to restart (or from MAORI).
• If IDL tools do not show up, it could be:
  • The startup script may have problem getting an IDL license.
    • The script called killIDL on k2aoserver and k1aoserver would kill all IDL sessions started from a given ao server. It would likely make a license available to you. Let AO users know that you will cleanup IDL sessions (they will have to restart their own) and never hesitate to run this script when not having an IDL license impacts your operations.
    • The script checkidl list the people using an IDL license at the observatory. If sessions have been running for more than a few days, it is likely the user do not use it anymore. Let the user know that you need licenses for operations at night. Call software on-call if you do not have su privileges to cleanup the sessions.
  • If the xterm does not show up do an xhost + from a local xterm session.
  • Your login account is not listed in the .rhost file on k2aoserver or k1aoserver.
  • The system is down and IDL cannot connect to keywords.