Overview of instrument computers

The user should be aware of the following instrument computers:

	The Linux control computer called "dcs", IP address dcs.ncnr.nist.gov.
	The Linux analysis computer, called "solo", IP address solo.ncnr.nist.gov.
	The Windows analysis computer, unnamed.
	The chopper computer (a Pentium machine running DOS!), sometimes called "cute".

You will use dcs to set up runs and take measurements, and solo and/or the Windows computer to reduce, visualize and analyze your data (unless you choose to download your data directly to some other computer). To monitor chopper operations you may need to examine the chopper computer screen but you should not need to (and you should not, unless instructed) touch its keyboard.

The username for dcs, solo and the Windows computer is "dcs". Your local contact will tell you the password (which is changed periodically).

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The following remarks apply to both dcs and solo

	The home directory is /home/dcs
	Data for the current reactor cycle are stored in a directory such as /home/dcs/data/200210, or more generally /home/dcs/data/yyyymm where yyyymm designates the reactor cycle, yyyy and mm being the year and month that the reactor cycle started. (The data acquisition software writes raw data files to this directory on dcs, and the update command may be used to copy these files to the identically named directory on solo. Note that this should not normally be necessary since an automatic update is performed every 10 minutes.)
	The command "cdd" may be used to change to the current data directory.
	The command "lsth" lists the most recent 10 files in the current directory.

Raw data files have names such as 20021017_04.dcs.gz (up to and including calendar year 2002) or 20030218_023.dcs.gz (starting with calendar year 2003), i.e. yyyymmdd_ii.dcs.gz or yyyymmdd_iii.dcs.gz, where yyyy, mm and dd are the year, month and day that the file was created and ii or iii is a sequence number. The files are written in a binary format that can be read using software called Octave (closely related to Matlab).

Raw data files should only be examined on solo (not on dcs). To read raw data files using Octave they should be unzipped using the gunzip command. Having exited from Octave any unzipped files should be rezipped using the gzip command.

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Last modified 24-March-2003 by website owner: NCNR (attn: John Copley)