Hi there,
I've had quite a large response to my request. Thanks to everyone who has responded. I will post a full summary in due course, but in the meantime I think it's fair to say that no one who has responded has managed to get TS 1.3 running satisfactorily under Centos 7 (at least 2 people have tried). There is some confidence that TS 2.1 should work with CentOS 7 using the extra packages available at
ftp://ftp.bruker.de/pub/nmr/CentOS/ However, I don't think any of the respondents have actually done it yet (apologies if you did - I need to re-read all the responses). There was one report of both TS 1.3 and 2.1 being used successfully with CentOS 6 to run DRX and Avance hardware (again using CentOS packages from the Bruker ftp site). TS 2.1 has also been made to work with 32 bit Win7Pro controlling an Avance system. The most popular suggestion has been to continue to use a working, albeit obsolete OS (in my case CentOS 5, but some people are using older OSs) and put the affected PCs behind their own router/firewall.
I think I'm going to try to get TS 2.1 running with CentOS 7 for the Avance systems and if that doesn't work I'll try CentOS 6 for both the Avance systems and the DRX. CentOS 6 has an EOL of November 2020. If I end up spending more than a couple of afternoons without success I'll look into the pragmatic CentOS 5 router/firewall option.
Thanks again everyone,
Pat.
From: Edwards, Pat [mailto:P.J.Edwards_at_massey.ac.nz]
Sent: Thursday, 9 March 2017 12:16 p.m.
To: ammrl_at_ammrl.org
Subject: AMMRL: Upgrading / managing Bruker spectrometers with PCs running older operating systems
Hi there,
Apologies if this has been discussed before. I did try searching the archives, but I was having trouble with the search function when I tried to use it this morning.
I was wondering if managers of Bruker systems could give me some advice and/or share their experience on how they are dealing with PCs which are using obsolete operating systems and / or versions of Topspin in order to control older Bruker hardware. Specifically, we have two 12 year old Avance systems running Topspin 2.1.8 and an 18 year old DRX system running Topspin 1.3.10. These are the most recent versions that are compatible with the spectrometers. I replaced the host PCs for all the spectrometers about 5 years ago and after a bit of tinkering, installing missing libraries etc. I got all systems running using 64 bit CentOS 5. These computers continue to work fine. However, university policy dictates that the computers now have to be either replaced or taken off the network. I don't think there's anything to stop me installing CentOS 5 on any new PCs. However, CentOS 5 reaches its EOL at the end of the month and will stop receiving updates.
The recommendation for optimal compatibility as stated in current version of the Bruker software support matrix document is to stick with the latest Bruker-supported OS (Centos 5 this case) and to block internet access for the computer. Maybe this is the only option, but before I commit to this I'd like to ask the following?
1. Has anyone had any success installing these versions of Topspin for data acquisition on PCs running current operating systems (CentOS 7, Windows 10)?
2. Has anyone tried running Topspin 2.1.8/1.3.10 in CentOS 5 as a VM hosted by CentOS 7 / Windows 10?
3. Does 2 even make any sense? My thinking was that you could run a "security-hardened", internet-restricted CentOS 5 inside a security-updated, current OS. Would this be any more secure than continuing to run CentOS 5 with internet access?
4. Realistically, would it be asking for trouble to continue to use CentOS 5 with internet access past its EOL?
Regards,
Pat Edwards.
Received on Thu Mar 09 2017 - 18:03:04 MST