Maintenance

[Thomas Droege <tdroege2@earthlink.net>]

This seems to be the week for cooling water maintenance.  TOM1 cooling
water blocked a few days ago and last night the TOM2,3 loop was blocked.  I
narrowed it down to the water temperature sensor but in the process
accidently got some cooling liquid into one (I hope just one) camera. 
Sigh!  The TOM2 I camera quit working.  So I will have to change it out.

I don't know how Gregorz Pojmanski keeps ASAS working from Poland.  I seem
to have near weekly maintenance problems.  Of course he uses mostly
commercial stuff, but he did design and build his own mount.  

It is a continuous struggle to keep everything running.  But when I do, I
get an average of 2 million measurements a night.  Sure beats looking
through a telescope and estimating.  

Yesterday I sorted out most of the network problems after reloading a
computer to replace the sick dual processor.  Does anyone have the
experience that the dual processor machines seem to have more problems than
the single processor systems?  It seemed like a good idea to run dual
processors with big memory, but the cost saving is small if any, and the
maintenance seems a pain.  My current thinking is to get a big
Monitor/Keyboard/Mouse switch and run a lot of single processor computers. 
Looks like I will need 10 to go at the speed I need.  If I can keep one
dual processor machine running I will use it for analysis.

All in all I seem to be keeping pretty busy in retirement.  

Tom Droege