Realtime Status Monitoring over the WWW

There is a computer at UofM that is configured to act as a web server for the URL http://www.rotse.net. Once a minute, a PERL script runs on this computer. It queries each ROTSE-III control computer in sequence over a socket connection with the rotsed on each system. It extracts a packet of status variable values and writes them to a local text file in JavaScript format. These variables give information about the state of the entire telescope, which daemons are running, what alarms are currently active, what the weather conditions are, and various header values from the most recent image recorded. The JavaScript files are accessed by the web pages on our site in order to display up-to-the-minute tables of the system status. See Figure 8.4 for an example of what an active display might look like.

Along with the JavaScript status variables, we also copy the thumbnail images that are produced by sexpacman (Section 8.2.1), as well as the analysis status monitor GIF file produced by idlpacman (Section 8.2.2). These images can be accessed through the pushing of buttons on the status display table page, as shown in Figure 8.4. Figure 8.2 shows a typical thumbnail, and Figure 8.3 shows an example of an analysis status image.

Upon receipt of a pager alert message from rotsepager, you may wish to monitor telescope response by periodically reloading http://www.rotse.net/burst_response/, which is automatically updated by software both at the site and on rotse1. These pages will contain tables listing any uncatalogued or highly variable sources near the published GRB position, along with light curve plots and cropped images for each observation. The presence of a candidate GRB counterpart should be immediately obvious from these data. See Sections 8.2.3 and 8.4.1 for more information.

Figure 8.4: Sample window for a WWW display of current ROTSE-IIIa system status. This display is somewhat outdated. The most recent version also includes a button to display the analysis status figure (as shown in Figure 8.3) as well as the most recent thumbnail (Fig. 8.2). The contents of the table have been expanded and made more intelligent as well; some parameters are only shown if they take on ``interesting'' values.

Table 8.1: Bitmasks for the ROTSE-III sites.

Bitmask	Meaning
0$\times$0001	Accept alerts for Australia
0$\times$0002	Accept alerts for Namibia
0$\times$0004	Accept alerts for Turkey
0$\times$0008	Accept alerts for Texas
0$\times$0010	Accept alerts for Maui

Table 8.2: Bitmasks for status to check.

Bitmask	Meaning
0$\times$0001	Check the weather status
0$\times$0002	Check the clam shell status
0$\times$0004	Check the camera status

Table 8.3: Bitmasks for the types of ROTSE-III alerts.

Bitmask	Meaning
0$\times$0001	Daily I'm Alive Pages
0$\times$0002	Socket Down Notification
0$\times$0004	ALL Types (does not include daily alerts or error notification)
0$\times$0008	Test Alerts: Types 2, 44, and INTEGRAL Tests. Not recommended.
0$\times$0010	Type 27: RXTE-PCA GRB
0$\times$0020	Type 29: RXTE-ASM GRB
0$\times$0040	Type 39: IPN Position
0$\times$0080	Type 40: HETE-ALERT
0$\times$0100	Type 41: HETE-UPDATE
0$\times$0200	Type 42: HETE-FINAL
0$\times$0400	Type 43: HETE-GROUND
0$\times$0800	Type 45: GRB_CNTRPART
0$\times$1000	Type 51: INTEGRAL-POINTDIR (No GRB information)
0$\times$2000	Type 52: INTEGRAL-SPIACS (GRB Timing information only)
0$\times$4000	Type 53: INTEGRAL-WAKEUP
0$\times$8000	Type 54: INTEGRAL-REFINED
0$\times$00010000	Type 55: INTEGRAL-OFFLINE