allsky1 camera system laptop failure
The laptop computer that runs the SCO allsky1 camera had a hard drive failure (exacerbated by all of the heat I suspect… will have to put more exhaust fans into the observatory). It was about 8 years old.
The last total mirror image backup was back in February 2012 but that was ok as not much had changed.
The only replacement computer around here was an old a/v system that was plugged into the TV. An old Pentium 4 @1.8Ghz, again around 8 years old. Applied the backup and it did not want to run… the hardware is too different in the laptop to desktop transition. So the last few days have been spent rebuilding the desktop to work with the complex mouse scripts to get the old (2002) CCDSOFT software to run.
Got it running last night (Sunday) manually but there is still a lot of small configuration issues to sort out. The computer was also installing 116 MS updates and rebooted itself at 03:00am or so this morning, aborting the imaging run.
oh well.. time to start another backup.