Starting e-Remote Control

Note that these steps are only necessary if e-remote Control is not already running.

It seems its best to start Hobart 12 [hb] first to avoid communication conflicts between econtrol and other field systems.

e-Remote Control (formerly known as econtrol) can be started from the Applications menu on ops2 (or on the local ops machines at Yarragadee and Katherine):

Applications -> AuScope [Hobart|Katherine|Yarragadee] -> e-remote control

Click on the tab with the name of the antenna (e.g. “Hobart12”) and you'll be prompted for a username and password. From the AuScope Operations room, use the oper account. From Yarragadee use the ygobserver account and from Katherine keobserver. It's the usual password. Start the Hobart econtrol first or you may run into socket issues.

Click on the boxes next to “StatusMonitor“ and “Logging and Operator Input”. This should trigger the program to connect to pcfs[hb|ke|yg] and you’ll see a status window and log window. If you don't see any information updating in the status window, type [ctrl]-[shift]-e to start the server process on the field system.

Troubleshooting

Common problems that cause E-remote to not respond include:

• E-remote is no longer connecting to the field system computer. Anything but a green rectangle in the bottom right hand corner of e-remote is bad.
• The field system computer is no longer connected to the internet. Check this by pinging pcfs[hb|ke|yg] (or just opening a VNC session).
• The field system has crashed. VNC into pcfs[hb|ke|yg] and make sure the field system software is running. If not, start it in an empty terminal. You will have to restart the setup procedure.
• It's just decided to have a fit, in which case simply closing the e-remote session and re-opening it may fix it. If the field system has been running the whole time and the problem is with the e-remote software only, you will NOT have to restart the entire setup procedure as the schedule should have been running the whole time.

If you still don't see any status window updates the server process may need re-starting. Exit from e-remote control, open a terminal in the VNC session on pcfs[hb|ke|yg] and type

 ps -ef | grep ercd 

If this returns a list of one or more processes, kill them with a

 pkill ercd

Then go back to the top of this page and try starting e-remote control again.

If ctrl shift e does not work, run this code from a terminal in the pcfs VNC:

/usr2/eremotectrl/bin/ercd /usr2/eremotectrl/config/eremotectrl.conf

Once it is running, e-remote control is the main observing interface. You can send PCFS commands and comments from the bottom of the log window. Note you won’t see the log window update until you type in a command or the next scheduled command is sent.

Also click on the “M5 Capacity” box to view M5 Capacity

Alternative way to have alarms

If you cannot get eremnote control to work you can still have log monitor alarms. You can use Dave's stream log script. On a terminal in ops8 type (e.g for hb):

stream_log hb

This will begin streaming the log from pcfs to /tmp/hb.log. Then from the log monitor, start monitoring that file (/tmp/hb.log). Seems to be best to do a clkoff first.