I have an elusive problem, hardware I believe, on my Varian Mercury
300. This is the early Mercury model, before the plus or the PPC
version. The instrument dates to September, 1997. The instrument is
one of the "4-nuclei" consoles and so is configured to do proton,
fluorine, carbon and phosphorus.
The problem that has Varian and me stumped so far is that the console
hangs with "Acquiring" in the Status window after the first
transient. It hangs hard. The "AA" command to abort has no effect,
although the VNMR window (6.1A patched) is still active. The "su
acqproc" command fails to clean things up completely, too, since an
error message is generated that says the receive process is still
acquiring, trying 'kill -9'. Indeed, the only way out is to reboot
the console (the red button) and do the "su acqproc". This is not
an intermittent problem - the console fails to acquire a FID every
time.
What is interesting is that "acqi" works fine. The shims are active,
magnet control is good, spin, lock and in fact everything to do with
lock and magnet control is fine. Also, steady state pulses work just
fine (aha, you say) and you can see pulses generated on the output
lines.
What fails is that after the command to convert the console hangs...
We've replace the ADC card and the STM/output card. NADA. (and
expensive - whoo) We've pulled and pushed and prodded and stomped on
(well, not stomped on) every card and cable and wire that we can.
NADA.
I also must point out that the instrument has *never* worked properly
on any software revision past 6.1A. Thus, I'm still running 6.1A and
that is actually good enough for our purposes. But it has worked, in
fact, beautifully and was very stable on 6.1A until last week.
Running patched Solaris 2.6 (but that isn't the problem either since
it worked fine until recently). We are behind a firewall (several
actually) and there isn't any obvious evidence of an infection (but
would there be).
Any thoughts? Anyone with a Mercury see this before? I'm close to
calling in the troops and I've *never* done that. Thanks.
cdr
--
*****************************
Christopher D. Rithner, Ph.D.
Director, Central Instrument Facility
Senior Research Scientist / Scholar
Research Associate Professor
Chemistry Department
1872 Campus Delivery
Colorado State University
Ft. Collins, CO 80523
(ph) 970-491-6475
(fx) 970-491-1801
mailto://cdr_at_colostate.edu
http://cif.colostate.edu
http://nmr-newsletter.colostate.edu
Received on Thu Apr 13 2006 - 16:07:57 MST