- a "/sciops" area for storage of and work on SciOp data, i.e.
service observing, technical data, etc. It must hold at least one
period of Service Mode (NTT/3P6: 70Gb) and leave ~70Gb of space for
data processing, i.e. >~140Gb for NTT/3P6. For 2P2, the Service data
are not stored locally, but the data processing requires more space, so
similar (>~140Gb) disk should be provided.
- EXTERNAL DISKS: the machine should have at least 2 USB2/Firewire slots to hot-plug some external disks, such as
- Instrument disks: each instrument shall have a ~100Gb
disk for storrage of calibration plan data, work in progress, etc...
under the responsibility of the Instrument Scientist.
- Visitors' disk, in case they have a compatible disk.
The operating system should be
configured in such way that it recognises and mount automatically these
disks, and permits the users to umount/remove them without root
privileges in a documented way.
- DISPLAY: large, high-res, flat screen. Dual display would be an advantage but is not critical.
- CD/DVD: a
read-only unit, and a read-write unit. External unit (USB2/Firewire)
living on the desk as opposed to the computer room would be a nice
luxury provided that this does not degrade transfer rates. As
there are several standards for DVDs (DVD-R, DVD-RW, DVD+RW...) it is
important to check which standard the drive will support. These days it
is possible to get drives compatible with more than one standard e.g.
the Sony DRU-500A Dual RW DVDRW, see for example
http://www.cdrlabs.com/reviews/index.php?reviewid=154
- KEYBOARD: Standard (i.e. not "Ergonomic") US layout.
- MOUSE: Optical, 3buttons, 1 wheel.
2.2 Software
- Standard operating system (recommended by VLT, currently RH-7.3),
- Standard applications. This must include the following, properly configured:
- Editors: EMACS, VI
- Text edition: LaTeX
- Document viewers: xdvi, ghostview, acroread, xv, dvips, a2ps
- Web broweser:Mozilla
- CD-related: xCDroast (with the proper staging space configured) and related cdrecord; cdlabelgen
- Spreadsheet: Gnumeric
- Figure editor: xfig
- Version control: CMM
- SciSoft updated to the latest available version, with local
configuration (printers visible from the application softwares, IDL
licenses, IRAF pipes, etc...) and patches (infamous
/scisoft/saord/bin/access conflicting with LateX).
- dhsSubscribe installed and configured to transfer all raw data
from the w*dhs machine. In a next step, we may add a secondary
dhsSubscribe for pipeline processed data. dhsSubscrive can be
left with its "default" options (ie store the data in
/data/raw/<date>, DHS filenames, no post-arrival script)
2.3 ACCOUNTS
In addition to the various system related accounts:
- sciops: used for
installation and owner of sciops-related programs (eg MIDAS scripts).
This is the equivallent of the nttops or e3p6ops accounts on the
current w*off
- astro: used by Sciop astronomers for daily work
- visitor1, 2, 3: used by
the visiting astronomers during their runs. These accounts will be
zapped and re-initialized for each new visitor. These accounts could
(should ideally be) the current lsusr* accounts delivered to the
visitors on the off-line DRL system, PROVIDED that the access time to
their home directory is much faster than currently.
Additionally, the accounts should be configured to use GNOME, and the
path should include a ~sciops/bin directory so that we can install
programs under configuration control but without inserting them in the
standard configuration.
