- 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 strongly recommended. Color depth should be set to
be compliant with MIDAS and IRAF primarilly, IDL if possible (16b?).
- 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
- Microsoft compatibility: Gnumeric, AbiWord. Star/OpenOffice could
be installed, provided that there is a stable version that is usable.
- 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 (eg 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.
