MPC Status Page: Archive (2003 October)

Recent problems are listed elsewhere. Index of other older problems..

Older Enhancements and Resolved Problems

• Incoming Email Processing System Upgrade IV

  2003 Oct. 31: 17:00. Because of the new way incoming messages are handled, the junk rating feature also needed modification. The junk rating value is now correct.

• Numbered Residual Blocks in MPES

  2003 Oct. 29: 14:00. A user reported that residual blocks for numbered minor planets were not available in the MPES. A quick check showed that the logical disk names on the web server had not been updated following the Oct. 14 hardware failure mentioned below. The logical disk names have now been updated.

• Magnitudes in MPES

  2003 Oct. 27: 18:00. Magnitudes are now suppressed if the computed magnitude is fainter than V = 35. This is to prevent silly magnitudes being displayed for objects that are showing very little (if any) of their sunlit side.

• Last night's DOU MPEC

  2003 Oct. 27: 10:00. Last night's DOU MPEC announced that it was the last MPEC to be issued prior to the preparation of the next batch of MPCs. This announcement is erroneous and should be ignored.

• Incoming Email Processing System Upgrade III

  2003 Oct. 25: 20:00. The recently introduced new e-mail processing system is more strict about requiring valid e-mail address in AC2 lines. The old system was more forgiving. The new system has now been tweaked to recognize patently invalid e-mail addresses and to inform user, via the acknowledgement message, when invalid entries occur. The junk rating feature has been reenabled, it being disabled when the new system was introduced.

• Last night's DOU MPEC

  2003 Oct. 23: 12:00. The new NEO observations failed to get put on last night's DOU MPEC. There was an error entry in the batch log file. It has been investigated and it has been determined that it was a transient problem. The missing observations will be on the next DOU MPEC.

• Incoming Email Processing System Upgrade II

  2003 Oct. 18: 11:30. The recent total rewrite of the incoming e-mail processing system is working nicely. The new system aims to cut down on the number of batches (a very small fraction of the received batches) that do not get processed properly. It has also enabled us to put in some features to ensure better communication between MPC and CBAT (remembering that MPC and CBAT are separate organizations with different responsibilities and reporting to different parts of the IAU): CBAT will now get automatic copies of batches identified by the AUTOACK system as containing NEOCP observations.

• Hardware failure

  2003 Oct. 14: 10:30. Another SCSI card has failed in one of our machines sometime last night. As a result this machine crashed and failed to reboot. We can continue to process incoming observations, but some pages (such as the date of last observation pages) cannot be updated until the problem is fixed.
  • 10:30. If you are seeing problems with the web services, this is probably the reason.
  • 10:30. Trying to get hold of an administrator to confirm that service contract was renewed on Oct. 1...
  • 11:30. Can't get hold of an administator. Service has been called.
  • 12:00. After speaking with service we have determined that the problem is not with the SCSI card, but with the system disk. Awaiting call to tell us when local service will be coming with replacement.
  • 13:30. Local service called to say a replacement part would not be available until tomorrow morning. Fortunately, the two user disks on the affected machine were in an external expansion box. We have attached this box to another machine. All user disks are again visible across the cluster.

• Column Headings in Earth-Orbiting Space Junk Tracker

  2003 Oct. 11: 10:30. The layout of the column headings in the output from the EOSJT script was fixed so that the headings were over the columns.

• Comet Magnitudes for Perturbed Orbits

  2003 Oct. 8: 10:30. A small bug in calculated magnitudes for comets with perturbed orbits that only showed itself under certain circumstances was located and fixed.

• Incoming Email Processing System Upgrade

  2003 Oct. 1: 16:30. At some point in the next 36 hours or so we will be bringing our new incoming-email processing system online. This is the system that extracts observation-bearing emails, acknowledges them and places them in the appropriate processing queues. This new code has received extensive off-line testing, but it needs to be tested "in combat" on-line. We will first disable the existing system and then, over the course of a few hours, run the new system manually at irregular intervals so that we can watch the process running to ascertain that it is operating correctly. Once we are satisfied with new code, we will let it loose to run automatically. Observers may experience a delay in getting acknowledgements until the new code is running automatically. We emphasize that there will be no change in the submission address for observation batches and, once the new system is operating fully, the acknowledgements will arrive in the same timely fashion as before. From the MPCs viewpoint, the processing of the extracted batches will be significantly simplified.
  • Oct. 3: 16:30. The new system was brought on-line in manual mode. A number of problems were identified and fixed. The first batch to be processed was a routine batch from NEAT. The first batch to go through the system without any problems was a batch of comet observations from code 785.
  • Oct. 3: 22:38. After watching a number of batches being run through the new system, it was submitted for automatic execution at 22:38. Logging of the batch job has been enabled and a check of these logs will be made tomorrow morning to see if any other problems have arisen.
  • Oct. 4: 11:00. An examination of the overnight logs of the new system showed one minor problem with the misfiling of one type of batch. This has now been fixed, logging has been disabled and the new system is now the default.

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