Various

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

• As an experiment, data on DVDs was given to some observers with good feedback. However, in dry weather the regular DVD drives failed.

• The problem with the CD carousel have continued, and we are now testing a new robotic system that writes DVDs (or CDs) and automatically prints labels on them. We had some problems with the special DVDs that were delivered with the system as they turned-out to have scratches on them which made the tests fail. We are currently continuing testing with DVDs purchased locally.

• Software for backing-up home directories has been selected. However, it is still an open question what the final hardware configuration will be. E.g., this might be the CD carousel which we probably can/will not use for data saving at the observatory, or removable hard disk drives.

• As part of the expansion of the sea-level office, the network was reorganized, a gigabit switch was installed and all desktop wall connections were enabled for gigabit.

• Both the hardware and the software of the DNS name server was upgraded to provide faster, and especially more reliable network access.

• To provide up-to-date versions of some of the software applications commonly used by people, network installation instead of local (i.e., limited to a specific computer) installations were provided for IRAF and Acrobat Reader. In the future, with each new (version of an) application we will decide if we should provided it either as a network or local installations such that we limited the amount of work, while having as much as possible up-to-date versions of applications. In general we should aim for network installation, which should be considered in the set-up of new computers in the network (as for compatibility in hardware and operating systems).