[daip] all clear

[Eric Greisen]

Deborah Haarsma writes:
 > Eric and/or daip,
 > 
 > We tried re-booting our Linux machines, and the problem with aips
 > tasks not starting has disappeared.  (Usually in Linux you like to know
 > what went wrong and why, but sometimes the Bill Gates way turns out to
 > work. :-/)
 > 

The AIPS start-up does depend on a number of things going right.
Mainly this would be the TGET/TPUT file, the task communication file,
and the system parameter file.  In particular, if the last one were
locked by some rogue process, then tasks would appear not to start.
They should show up in ps however but hang waiting for that file and
aips would eventually conclude that they had not started.  You could
look in /tmp for files of 0 bytes like /tmp/COMB1.12345 where 12345 is
the process ID number under which COMB1 should be running.  Maybe
there was a lock on /tmp.  But in these cases aips would get an error
in ZACTV9 and not reach the timing out portion of the code.

Glad a re-boot solved it.  Linux does get in knots sometimes and this
is the cleanest solution.

Cheers, 

Eric Greisen