Atmospheric Observatory

Atmospheric Observatory on department computer

It's very possible in the future that the data will only be stored on the ITS disk, which is highly backed-up, and a department machine will be unneccessary. However, currently the ITS disk is fairly slow to access and does not allow direct access from the web. (Direct access is not possible because the ITS disk will not allow our standard web user, nobody, to read the ITS disk. It is possible to get round this by using CGIWrap, which runs web applications as a user - which is given in the URL. Although this currently requires a fairly convoluted URL.)

Access to disk

The data is stored on a disk attached to the machine labserver, which can be accessed from

• fieldsite computer as labserver\labdata (I think), and
• department computer machines by ssh into labserver and move to directory /export/labserver/data (this disk is also visible from the webserver, cree).

The size of this disk is 867GB. There's another disk attached to labserver (/export/labsever/data2), which is 917GB but use of this has not been remotely needed yet (use df -h to see the use of these disks).

One user, sws09a

All the main data should now be owned by sws09a. Previously, data was owned by a variety of users, especially swslab, with the obvious associated problems of moving and accessing the data.

It's not practical to change the ownership of everything to sws09a, and so it's important that the user swslab can still write to directories owned by users such as swslab. swslab is part of the same group as sws09a (group is called labs) and so where the files or directories have changed ownership to sws09a, write permission has been given to the group - so that anyone in the group can still write to these files and directories. In the long term, once all applications are running as sws09a, the group permission to write to these files and directories should be removed.

The data on this disk is discussed on the pages on live data and other data