Q: How can I tell how big the tar file is going to be?

A: When you Browse data on the Retrieval screen, the browse window will list the total size along the top. However, you should note that the sizes are for the uncompressed products while transfer will take place in compressed form; on average, the compression is about a factor 2.

Q: Why can't I cut-and-paste that horrible tar file name?

A: Cutting and pasting from Java windows in Unix does not work very well. That's why we write the file path to a log file, so you can cut-and-paste from that (see next question). By the way, the "horrible" name provides protection in case you are retrieving proprietary data.

Q: Where do I find the transfer log?

A: The filename is "chaser.log" and it is located in the directory that you specified on the screen.

Q: How do I get the tar file(s) and what do I do with them?

A: Issue the following commands:

	ftp cda.harvard.edu
	bin
	cd <directory>
	dir
	mget *
	bye
    

Use the full directory path given on the screen or in your logfile; do not yet download tar files with names that contain InProgress. If the directory appears empty, the tar file is not yet ready; please try again in a short while.

To use the tar file(s), on Unix systems:

	tar tvf <file name>        - to inspect the tar file's contents
	tar xvf <file name>        - to extract the files from the tar file
    

If there are multiple files because the request exceeded 2 GB:

	cat <file name 1> ... <file name n> | tar tvf -
	cat <file name 1> ... <file name n> | tar xvf -
    

Q: I am running twm/tvwm/olwm; why are my ChaSeR screens mutilated?

A: (Unix systems only) This is not a ChaSeR problem, but something that affects many Java applications. The window managers in the twm family (twm, tvtwm, olwm, ...) predate serious Java development and contain a number of bugs that had not come to light until people started running Java applications like ChaSeR. The Sun Java Developer site lists some 50 bugs but states categorically that these window managers are not supported and that these bugs will not be fixed. The only option is to switch to another window manager, such as CDE, KDE, Gnome. To check which window manager you are running, type:

ps -gax | grep wm
    

or:

ps -e | grep wm
    

If this returns twm or tvtwm, then you may expect problems. Note that it affects not only the operation of ChaSeR itself, but possibly also the the installation program; it may hang during execution.

Q: Are the exposure times that are displayed in the search results window accurate?

A: What is really listed as exposure time is the time "charged" to the proposal. That is the actual exposure time ("good time"), except in a few cases where the observation collected on purpose a large dead time fraction.

Q: I specified a large range in galactic coordinates, but the search results bear no resemblance to that constraint. How come?

A: This is a bug that will be corrected in the future. The search constraint works reasonably well for fairly small rectangles that do not cover one of the poles. In addition, querying with coordinates may give different results than querying by uploading a files of coordinates.

Q: Where do I find data associated with Engineering Requests?

A: ChaSeR cannot access data products associated with Engineering Requests (ER). For access to ER data use RetrievER. Note that ERs do not contain any data that are of scientific interest and users may safely ignore them.