Short List of SICS Programs

Logging in to Unix Workstations

You are required to have a user name and a password in order to log on to one of the instrument workstations. There are several possible cases:

You have a PSI network account in the LNS group: use your very own name and password.
You are a guest: use account lnsg with password Saphir. You will be asked for your name, type it in and you will be automatically directed to a directory of your own.

Running the SICS Instrument Control System

SICS is a client server system. This means there is a server doing the hard work and client programs with which you interact. Thus in order to run SICS two programs are necessary.

A SICS server: You need not worry about that one. The system will keep it alive. But see below.
A SICS Client.: These are the programs you interact with. There are different ones for different instruments. The next section shows how to start them.

All SICS Clients are inactive after having been started up. In order to be useful each client needs to be connected to a SICS instrument control server. This is achieved through the menu entries in the Connect menu. For usage instructions for the clients, consult the help menu of the client in question.

General SICS Clients

This section describes SICS clients common to all instruments. There are two of those:

The SICS Command Line Client allows to control the instrument. It can be started by typing: sics &. SICS supports a hierarchical system of user privileges. After connecting to a SICS server a client may look at everything but cannot change anything or even run an experiment. In order to do this, you need to authorize yourself at the SICS server. This can be done with the User Parameters/Set Rights dialog. A valid username/password combination is: lnsuser/98lns2. When starting a new experiment do not forget to set experiment information with the User Parameter/New Experiment menu. Otherwise we might find it impossible to recover your files when you ask for them in 10 years time.

The second general pupose SICS client is the variable watcher. It plots the value of any SICS variable over time. It can be started by typing: varwatch & at the command prompt. This client must be connected and configured through the Plot/Configure menu before becoming useful.

DMC Programs

The powder diffractometer DMC has two special programs:

A status display, which shows the current powder diagram together with some auxiliary information. It can be started by typing powderstatus & at the command prompt.

Another program is used for summing and subtracting powder diffraction diagrams to a result diagram and to write the result in ASCII. This program can be started by typing powderplus & at the command prompt.

TOPSI Programs

TOPSI has only a status display, which shows the current scan together with some auxiliary information. It can be started by typing topsistatus & at the command prompt.

SANS Programs

SANS has only a status display, which shows the current detector counts and some auxiliary information. It can be started by typing sansstatus & at the command prompt.

SICS Manager Commands

These commands install and start SICS services. They must be executed from the instrument account on the instrument computer. When using the shell script sicsinstall, you need to be in the home directory of the instrument account. The commands are:

startsics: starts all SICS servers properly. Usually this must only be used after a reboot of the instrument computer.
sicsinstall exe: installs new SICS executable files into the appropriate directories.
sicsinstall instrument: installs all files necessary for running the instrument. instrument must be one of: dmc, topsi or sans.