A day of little things:'

With Steve and Mike on hand, we were able to further demonstrate the suitability of Windows 7 and LabView 2013 for upgrades to the BEMC machines, emcsc and hoosier.  An open question is what version of LabView 2013 do we need - I would guess just the Basic version, but hard to know as I'm not a LabView expert (heck, I'd hesitate to even call myself a LabView user).

Yesterday was a partcularly bad day for onl53 - it rebooted 10 times.  Checked the logs but see no evidence of a problem - it is running along and just reboots itself without any thing abnormal in the logs that I've detected.  Opened a ticket for it (2760), and tried to make sure the power cable was firmly plugged in at both ends - speculating (with no basis whatsoever) that perhaps it was just loose enough that people walking by the rack were jostling it - seems highly unlikely, but no other ideas at the moment.

The "old" L4 machines were powered up in the new rack with temporary network cables.  They all appeared to boot normally from daqman with their new l40[N].l4.bnl.local IP addresses.

In the mildly interesting category of learning something new, Paul Sorensen was looking for a way to record the online event viewer in action on l3disp-run09 in the Control Room.  We came up with a couple of solutions that seemed like they could work for him.  One was the mundane but surprisingly acceptable way - just connect to the l3disp machine via SSH and run the l3viewer on his MacBook, where he could make a video captue of his own desktop.  It was running well even with his laptop on Corus.  The "novel" way was to use recordmydesktop which I installed for him.  With some reading of the CLI options (most importantly the --full-shots and --window-id options) it was able to get a reasonably good capture.  Without the --full-shots option, the capture was useless - it did not follow the animation at all.  I speculate that it has something to do with the use of OpenGL that was preventing it from detecting changes.

Jack reported that he could not login to operator@rts02 via SSH.  Discovered this was because ~operator had been given group write permissions, which sshd rightfully does not like.  Coordinated with Jeff to clean that up, altering some permissions and putting Jeff's individual account into the operator group so he can still write what he needs to.

Pulled out some Windows System event logs of a problem plaguing us lately.  Often the Windows Vista and Windows 7 machines complain about a "duplicate IP address detected" when they boot at 1006.  Sent the logs and some info to Mark L. and Frank B., plus opened an RT ticket (#2761).

Was contemplating troubleshooting for the MPOD devices' network disconnects.  Since we don't have a hardware network tap, I realized we can probably do port mirroring on the South Platform switches and get the same sort of effect, using another host with Wireshark or some such playing the role of the network tap.  I think our Netgear switches on the South Platform can be configured to do port mirroring, but did not confirm yet.