Remote Workstation Manual

Source: https://astronomy.yale.edu/facilities/yale-nasa-keck-remote-observing-facility/remote-workstation-manual Parent: https://astronomy.yale.edu/undergraduate-program

1. Log on to workstation

• Shake the mouse to wake up the left-most computer screen. A login prompt should appear on the left-most screen, but the other screens will remain blank.
• Note: If you do not see anything on the left-most screen after shaking the mouse, press the power button on the bottom right of the screen to turn the monitor on.
• On the bottom left of the left-most screen, select “Session” to open a failsafe terminal.
• IMPORTANT!! Do NOT try to log in before opening this failsafe terminal using “Session”.
• Choose “Failsafe Terminal” from the options presented.
• Click the button that says “Change Session”.
• Then enter the username, followed by the password, to log in to the local machine.
• A message about the failsafe session will appear, click “OK”.
• At the prompt in the terminal window on the left screen, type “fvwm”.
• Voila! If all went well, you should now see four purple screens and a pink Xterm window in the left screen.

2. Open and use VNC terminals

Control Instruments

• Left-click on the background on the left-most screen and select XTerm to open a new terminal window.
• At the prompt in the new Xterm window in the left monitor, enter:
• kvncinst INSTRUMENTNAME INSTRACCOUNT#
  • Note: The instrument name and account number can be found here.
  • ex: kvncinst deimos deimos11
• You will be prompted three times for two passwords (which are on the password list). Enter the first password (for the Keck firewall) once and the second password (for the VNC server) twice.
• The tan colored instrument windows should now start to appear on the monitors. This may take a few moments.
• Open a menu with a right click of the mouse on any of the tan colored instrument windows (on the left three monitors) to start your instrument’s GUI.
• The GUI should begin to appear on the left three monitors.

Control Telescope

• NEW! The telescope control is now automatically run by kvncinst (see above) so there is no need to run kvnctel manually in the rightmost monitor as was previously done.

3. Observe!

4. Save data onto your own machine.

5. Close out all terminals & log out

• Close telescope control
• On the right-most screen, use the pager in the bottom left corner to navigate to the XTerm window where the kvnctel script was started (upper right quadrant).
• Enter CTRL-C in this window to kill the script.
• Then type “exit” (or CTRL-D) to close this window.
• Close instrument control
• On the left-most screen, enter CTRL-C in the XTerm window where the kvncinst script was started.
• Then type “exit” (or CTRL-D) to close this window.
• Close failsafe session
• Terminate the fvwm window manager with CTRL-C in the window in which it was started.
• Then type “exit” (or CTRL-D) to close this window.
• This procedure should automatically log you out of the local computer
• Please make sure to log out completely!