The ROTSE-III data acquisition system (``daq'' system) runs on Linux RedHat 6.2. It is comprised of a set of daemons that communicate via shared memory. The central ``rotse daemon'' (rotsed) handles the communication between the various daemons. The peripheral daemons each interface with a different piece of the hardware.
The control system has two modes, automatic and manual. The default mode is auto mode, where all the commands are issued by the astrod scheduler daemon (see Section 1.2.8). In manual mode, commands come from the Rotse User Shell (rush) via the userd daemon (see Section 1.2.9). rush is a light, telnet compatible shell based on rc that provides flexible access even from limited internet connections. In addition, the rmonitor program is a nice way to monitor status in realtime, described in Section 2.6.