iraf.net

I have my students learning IRAF to do some little projects and I'm running into an odd problem. They're all SSHing into a single workstation (with individual accounts) and then displaying the xgterm/ds9/etc windows on their own Mac laptops. To get ds9 to work, I've included the "export IMTDEV='net:5137'" in their .bashrc files.

The problem that I'm running into is that when they attempt to display images, all of the images display on one of the user's ds9 window. So an image that should be visible in one user's ssh session is being displayed in a completely different user's ssh session and nothing at all displays in the first user's ds9 window.

So, is there some simple way to fix this? Surely you have to be able to have multiple users on a machine!

Thanks,
Nathaniel

By defining the same IMTDEV for every student, you are saying that each student will be displaying to the default socket opened by each and every DS9 opened, causing the overlap. The main problem is that with DS9 v7.2 the default unix socket (based on the user-id) no longer works and so the IMTDEV workaround relies on a singular port number (5137) on the machine.

The workarounds are to : 1) use a DS9 version prior to v7.2 where the per-user unix sockets work, 2) use XImtool as the image display where the unix sockets work (and XImtool is included with IRAF v2.16), 3) modify the .bashrc files so that each student has a unique IMTDEV and an alias where 'ds9' defines a correspondingly unique "-port " flag.

Thanks for the quick reply. I ended up taking option three since that constituted the least work for me. All fixed now. It wouldn't be a terrible thing though if the ds9 people got their problem fixed....