Over the last 6 months, our installation of UXNMR (930301) on an X32
controlling our AMX300 has become increasingly unreliable. Two common
symptons have been:
1) spectacular crashes of the entire unix system. This is usually
characterized by the error message "Graphics server has crashed. Restart
graphics server or exit UXNMR??" being printed over the spectral display.
Attempts to restart the graphics server always fail, and attempts to exit
UXNMR usually also fail, and result in a shutdown and reboot of the system
being neccesary. However, on one or two occaisions, there has been no error
message, and the graphics display has simply disappeared.
2) experimental areas becoming "corrupted". This has been characterized by
an inability to change parameters from the command line - including
parameters such as the reciever gain, and "1s td" required for transforming
our 3D image data. This has usually been solved by deleting the entire
experiment directory structure from unix (the dreaded rm -r) and recreating
the area from standard parameters.
Our question is twofold:
a) Has anyone else experienced either of these symptons above, and if so,
how were they solved?
b) We are considering reformatting the hard-disk, and completely
reinstalling unix and uxnmr. However, I'm somewhat wary of the time and
effort that will be involved in such a course, realising this is a unix
machine, and not a VXR-4000 system with 6 floppy disks - so am keen to know
of other options. In particular, I know there has been questions over the
reliability of tape drives on the AMX systems - and ours has not been used
for some time (ie >18 months)
If anyone has any advice on our problems, and suggested course of action,
we would be most grateful to hear from you.
Many Thanks,
Ross Mair + Paul Callaghan
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Ross Mair Email: R.W.Mair@massey.ac.nz
NMR Lab Snail: Physics Dept., Massey Univ.
Department of Physics Private Bag 11222, Palmerston North
Massey University Fax: +64-6-3540207
Palmerston North Office: +64-6-3505520
New Zealand NMRlab: +64-6-3505333
http://www.massey.ac.nz/~wwphys/NMR/nmr_home.html
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