The Calar Alto Computer News for 1999

(Period from January to November 1999)

(A) Hardware:

- New 33Gb disks for the Instrument machines: ultra3 at 2.2m. (1 disk) and ultra1 at 3.5m. (2 disks)

- New 9Gb disk for the Instrument computer: ultra2 at 1.23m.

- New High Capacity DDS3 DAT Units for ultra3 at 2.2m. and ultra1 at 3.5m.

- New Switch for 100/10 Mbps nework at 1.23. The complete switched network at this telescope will be finished next year

- New SUN Ultra60 machine (ca1) for our Astronomy Group at Laboratory

- New system for automatic archive of images on CDROM (Mr. Zimmermann)

- New system for videoconference with Heidelberg

- A re-writer CDROM unit at laboratory

- Increased memory of several xterminals

- Two new Tektronix X-Terminals were placed at the 3.5m. Observer room, one with double monitor

- Finished the installation of switched TP network at the laboratory, 3.5 and 2.2

- New webserver (our WWW server) machine with better architecture and more memory

- New computer for our Meteosat Satellite receiver, faster and more reliable

- Increased up to 256 Kb. the bandwidth for our Satellite Link to Heidelberg. Tests on Instrumentation machines for routing them over the new link are in progress now (Mr. Zimmermann)

(B) Software:

- New Operating System on our server and on all the system client except instrumentation machines, archive computer and 2.2 telescope computer. The new operating system is Solaris 7. The reason for not installing that O.S. on the above computers is because those machines are running special software that do not support the new O.S. This will be studied in the future. (Tremmel, Guindos)

- Related to the point mentioned above is that our old SunOS server is no longer needed as all the services that were still running on that computer have been moved to the Solaris Server. It will run only for safety reasons during a short period of time.

- Automatic dome implemented (dauto program) on the 1.23 ( Hernández, Mueller, Thiele, Guindos)

- Registry of observers coming to Calar Alto. This is linked with the utility for creating listings of fits files taken. See below.

- Fitslist Utility: With that, listing of fits files can be created. The header will include the information entered when registering with the Registry program. For calling the utility use the command flist (or fitslist)

- Corrected fitscopyx utility for detecting problems with DAT's and end of tape mark.

- New wdxx program. Now the graphics of the weather tendency are not reseted at 00:00, and they continue as an endless graphic

- New web page for calculating weather statistics

- Rebuilding of our CAHA Utilities Web Page

- New version of IRAF (Revision 2.11) installed on the CAHA area. Also it has Stsdas package

- Several utilities installed, as ximtool, xgterm and the last version of saotng (v1.9)

- SuperMongo installed

- IDL 5.2 working on computers running Solaris 7 (2 licenses)

- Majordomo 1.94.4 has been installed

- The editor nedit was installed

CAHA SYSTEM GROUP (December 1999)

Ernst Schachtebeck (+34 950 632 505)

Enrique de Guindos (+34 950 632 517)