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Queuing an Observation Schedule

Working in the scheduling directory is strongly discouraged. It will very likely lead to frustration and spam for any other users on the ilofar account. It is advised to prepare schedules on your local machine or in the temp folder.

Once you have used the previous two guides to build a schedule file, you can then send it to be queued for observations. The schedule should be moved into directory at /home/ilofar/scheduling/schedules by whatever is determined the preferred method. On the ilofar user, the folder can be quickly accessed using the sched alias.

Once the file is in the folder, the monitoring service should notify you and pick up the file. It will be validated with the quicksched.py script, and then either moved to one of the prepared or failed directories, depending on the output. In the case of failure, the logs should be piped to you, or they will be accessible in the logs folder inside the scheduling directory. The file can be modified in the failed directory, and moved back one directory once you believe the issue is resolved.

A second monitoring process check for any files in the prepared directory initially when the files are moved in to the directory, then every 4 hours afterwards. If a schedule starts within the next 24 hours, it will be queued for execution, after which the interrupt.sh script will be needed to exit the opened shells, screens and tmux's before submitting a replacement schedule.

dmckenna@americano:~/git/scheduling$ rsync -avhP ./sched_2023-06-06.txt ~/scheduling/schedules/tmp/sched_2023-06-06.txt
dmckenna@americano:~/git/scheduling$ ssh ilofar@lgc

ilofar@LGC:~$ sched
ilofar@LGC:~/scheduling/schedules$ cat ./tmp/sched_2023-06-06.txt
2023-06-06T07:00 - 2023-06-06T13:29 :	[Sun357]
2023-06-06T13:30 - 2023-06-06T13:59 :	Crab_PSR [1.4596732110242794, 0.3842252837309499, 'J2000']
ilofar@LGC:~/scheduling/schedules$ mv ./tmp/sched_2023-06-06.txt ./
ilofar@LGC:~/scheduling/schedules$ 
Message from ilofar@LGC on (none) at 15:16 ...
Attempting to parse new input schedule at /home/ilofar/scheduling/schedules/sched_2023-06-06.txt
EOF

Message from ilofar@LGC on (none) at 15:16 ...
/home/ilofar/scheduling/schedules/sched_2023-06-06.txt: Success; moving schedule to the /home/ilofar/scheduling/schedules/prepared/ directory.
EOF
<ENTER>
ilofar@LGC:~/scheduling/schedules$