CMS Information Screen - Information for Systems Administrators

The screens are driven by low-power PCs running Seamonkey on Scientific Linux . They are set with the URL http://www.cms.cam.ac.uk/info/ as their homepage. This page refreshes every ten seconds, to loop through a title screen and then four departmental pages.

The server runs on bagpuss.damtp. Every five minutes it polls each of four XML feeds from talks.cam, parses the information and stores it in a local postgres database. The web pages are written in PHP.

The most likely problem with one of the displays will be due to a malfunction of the PC which is driving it. The fastest way to resolve this may be simply to reboot the machine or to restart the X server. SSH to the machine, "su" and then either "/sbin/reboot" or "killall gdm-binary".

Once the machine has rebooted, make a VNC connection to the machine over an ssh tunnel (ssh -L 42424:localhost:5900 -f -n texan.damtp.cam.ac.uk and then connect a VNC client to your localhost port 42424), collapse up any of the toolbars visible at the top of the screen and then hit f11 to enter full-screen mode.