[Demelerlab] Down server in Lethbridge

[Borries Demeler]

As most of you probably already know, the server in Lethbridge is down.
Emre and Kip Jay were able to recover the databases from our storage device
and install them in the Montana NRCH server. During the workshop, we were
able to access all of our testing data, and all worked fine.

This leaves the instruments, which are normally managed by the UltraScan
software installed on our server. With Emre's help, I was able to forward
the network ports through our firewall to the NRCH server, encrypting it
through an ssh tunnel (ssh is just wonderful!). So now it is possible to
run the instruments in Lethbridge from our server in Montana!!! All you
need to do is to login to the NRCH system's VNC server instead of the
uslims.uleth.ca server. You all should have accounts on the NRCH server.
Let me know if you need one and don't have one yet.

To distinguish Optima1 from Montana from the Optima1 in Lethbridge, you
will need to open a terminal shell and type "montana" or "uleth" at the
command line to switch between them. And of course you need to select the
appropriate database as well. It works like a charm now (it's a little bit
slower than it used to be when running it through uslims.uleth.ca, but
that's expected because the database communications are quite chatty and
distance sensitive. I am hoping that this works well enough to allow us to
run the data acquisition program without issues. This has not been tested
yet, so let me know if you are trying to run an experiment like this and
I'll work with you on this.

One potential issue may be that the connections are not persistent. I
believe there is a timeout variable that can be set to infinite. I have
not  yet checked this, and will see if this is necessary.

What this also means is this: If we can make this work, we could
potentially figure out a way to provide new clients with Ultrascan data
acquisition when their database is hosted in the public LIMS system, all
they need to do is to temporarily open up ssh to their instrument. Maybe a
new market opportunity.

-Borries
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