General developments

Various software and computer developments have occurred in the past few months. Below I list the most relevant things.

• Although the CD carousel now works properly at sea-level, it still fails regularly when being operated on the mountain. We believe this is due to the relative harsh environment on the mountain, and we have placed the carousel in a closed room in which we are currently installing an air-conditioning system

• Extensive experiments were made with DVD+R for data saving. With current software, we have been able to burn DVDs with astronomical data at a very high success rate. However, no definite choice on archive media has been made

• The Fault Report System was taken in to full operation at the start of the semester. This system works very well, and its usage has in a short time become part of core operations. The data-base provided by this system has also been very useful in preparing this report

• A new web camera was purchased and installed. This system includes its own server, which removed the need for a dedicated (windows) PC

• Investigations were made into the setup and operation of a data backup system for the SLO computers

• The SLO network was upgraded from 10 Mbit/s to 100 Mbit/s