After Your Experiment

The webpages of the User Office will tell you how to complete your Experiment Report.

Data can be viewed on site or off site following a few simple steps. To take data away, we recommend setting up the Data Dispenser in the beamline control rooms of I22 at the start of your experiment, as this will record all your data on the hard drive or other recording media you attach to the dispenser. The dispenser creates a simultaneous clone of your experiment directory, which is ready to take away as soon as your experiment ends.

Currently there is a problem opening the data dispenser normally. As a workaround the login appears to work if a private browser window is opened first. To get a private window , use Ctrl + Shift + P or click on the three lines in the top right hand corner of the firefox browser window and select Open a private window then going to http://i22-dd001.diamond.ac.uk/

To access your data while you are on site is possible from a Diamond desktop (read-write) or your own laptop on the Visitor Network (read-only). The Visitor Network is accessed by WiFi (DLS_VIS) or over a wired connection on a beamline (Black Cat 6 patch cables). Instructions on how to do that can be found here.

For the off line data access Diamond computers can be accessed from your own computer with the NoMachine software. More details on how you can install it can be found below. To retrieve your data from a previous session you will need to follow one of two separate routes depending on whether your visit was under or over 40 days ago.

Diamond provides multiple ways for users and staff to remotely connect. The most convenient, and recommended, is using NX.  This method, described here, does not require any special/extended privileges on the DLS network or machines.

NX (http://www.nomachine.com) is an alternative to VNC which has even better compression. It has the disadvantage of not being able to take over the console - you get a new X session.

NX server software is installed on nx-user.diamond.ac.uk

Typically, you just run an NX display from nx-user.diamond.ac.uk, and you can do this directly by:

• Download and install an NX client from nomachines. If you are using the Windows client, make sure you also download and install all available font packages for NX.
• Details of how to set this up can be found in the User Office Miscellaneous documents linked here
• Network speeds can be higher on good networks i.e. LAN not ADSL). Things to note the recommended Desktop is GNOME. You should not ssh directly into nx-user.diamond any more. This machine has changed recently and access should only be via nxclient. 

• Login with your normal username and password.

This gives you a session on a system inside the Diamond network (i.e. you are now, basically, logged in to a normal Diamond desktop).

There are occasional font problems with NX, especially with edm. Later versions of NX are better than earlier ones. You need at least a 3.3 version of the NX and client. You also need to download and install all the additional NX client fonts (as mentioned previously).

If you have problems with fonts in EDM screens, try typing the following immediately after logging in:

• dls-nx-fonts.sh

No Machine are aware of this and working on it; there is also work going on to patch edm to get around it.

It is highly recommended that you access and backup all your data as soon as possible after your visit to Diamond. However, there are occasions when this is not possible and Diamond do continue to make your raw data available to you. With the large volumes of data collected at Diamond each day, data is only guaranteed to be stored on disc for 30 days after your experiment. Older data are stored on tape.

Data no longer accessible directly from the data directories on the beamline can be retrieved from the Diamond archive, Topcat (https://icat.diamond.ac.uk). 

If you were not an investigator on the original session or the proposal when the data were collected, the Principal Investigator or Alternate Contact can now add you in UAS to the session for you to be able to access the data.

In extreme circumstances, if you have problems with using this archive please contact Diamond IT support ([email protected]), who may be able, with the permission of the PBS, to re-enable access to the data on the beamline. Please note we do not guarentee to keep data older than six months on these disks - if the data has been removed this option is not available.