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Table of Contents

The following are the official release notes for the MWA ASVO. Changes/fixes are tagged with:

  • Status
    colourGreen
    titleweb
     This item relates to the front end web site of the MWA ASVO and the associated VO TAP service.
  • Status
    colourBlue
    titleclient
     This item relates to the python API and command line client of the MWA ASVO (MWA ASVO: Command Line Client (manta-ray-client)).
  • Status
    colourYellow
    titlebackend
     This item relates to the server back-end of the MWA ASVO system, which includes the dispatch service, processor service and cotter.
  • Status
    subtletrue
    colourRed
    titleBreaking
     This represents a breaking change to existing functionality

20 January 2019 (Latest Release)

  • Enhancements:
    • Status
      colourYellow
      titlebackend
       The actual data transfer when downloading via the manta-ray-client or via wget / web browser is not unencrypted http traffic. NOTE: the URL you use still contains "https" however, the server will redirect you to a http URL of the server the files reside on. This should prevent firewalls from dropping encrypted traffic and also provide a modest efficiency/throughput increase.

12 December 2018

  • Enhancements:
    • Status
      colourGreen
      titleweb
       New registration / login option
      • You may now log in with your own institution account via a federated identity system.
      • Existing users with MWA ASVO accounts may continue to log in with them, as normal.
      • Existing MWA ASVO account users may also log in via their own institution. This utilises the MWA identity management framework that allows users to log on via thousands of different institutions via the Australian Access Federation (AAF) and the international federation: eduGAIN and UnitedID.
      • If you log in with a federated identity for the first time, you will be asked to go through a short one-time enrolment process to confirm your details and confirm your email address. 
      • If you are a current Phase 2 member of the MWA Collaboration and you have already enrolled with a particular login provider / institution as part of that process, then you will not need to enrol again, just log in.
      • Phase 2 MWA Collaboration members will also automatically have access to data as per the MWA Data Access Policy.
    • Status
      colourGreen
      titleweb
      Status
      colourBlue
      titleclient
       Calibration
      • Conversion jobs now have the option of finding and applying a calibration solution so it returns a calibrated measurement set or uvfits file. This output can then be used in standard radio astronomy tools for analysis / imaging (e.g. CASA, WSClean, etc)
      • From the website, just tick the "calibrate" check box; or via the mwa_client / API add "calibrate=true" to your conversion job options.
      • If an appropriate calibration solution exists for the observation, the MWA ASVO will provide you with a measurement set or uvfits file which has the calibration solution applied. 
      • If an appropriate calibration solution cannot be found for the observation then the job will fail. However, the system will add that observation to the top of the queue for calibration. Try the job again in 24-48 hours and the calibration solution is likely to be available.
      • NOTE: not all observations have calibration solutions, yet- this is something the MWA ASVO team are working on completing in the next few weeks. 
      • For more information about the calibration feature please see: Data Access > MWA ASVO Calibration Option.
    • Status
      colourBlue
      titleclient
      Status
      subtletrue
      colourRed
      titleBreaking
       manta-ray-client now uses an API key for authentication:
      • You will need to obtain the newest version of the manta-ray-client (mwa_client and API).
      • API key now replaces username/password for the API and mwa_client. 
      • ASVO_USER and ASVO_PASS environment variables are no longer used and should be removed from your .profile or .bashrc.
      • MWA_ASVO_API_KEY environment variable is now used to authenticate with the API / mwa_client.
      • Find your API key from your "Profile" on the MWA ASVO website- it has been auto-generated for you already and then set your MWA_ASVO_API_KEY environment variable to it.
      • The mwa_client and API now checks the API version on the server and if your client is out of date you will receive an error message asking you to get the latest version.
    • Status
      colourGreen
      titleweb
       UI improvements:
      • Verification and welcome emails now have html formatting for email clients that support it.
      • All help and documentation for the MWA ASVO has been moved to this wiki.
      • Minor look and feel improvements to the underlying web page template.
  • Fixes:
    • Status
      colourGreen
      titleweb
       Clicking the link in the email verification email sent during the registration process now correctly informs you that your verification was successful.
    • Status
      colourGreen
      titleweb
       When user submits data in a form e.g. registration, errors are more clearly highlighted in the browser.

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September 2018

  • Enhancements:
    • Status
      colourGreen
      titleweb
       The cone search now has a checkbox. When unchecked, it will perform a strict cone search against the observation pointing. When checked (this used to be the default behaviour), the cone search will show any results where the cone is anywhere within the primary beam. This will mean you get a lot more results than the strict cone search.
    • Status
      colourGreen
      titleweb
      Status
      colourBlue
      titleclient
       Conversion jobs now have the option to apply a unity bandpass correction. This is equivalent to the cotter “-sbpassband” option. Ticking the box will effectively cause the MWA ASVO to not apply the corrections by passing all 1’s to cotter.

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July 2018

  • Enhancements:
    • Status
      colourBlue
      titleclient
       new command line option: -e <error_file> | --error-file=<error_file> | --errfile=<error_file>. This allows users to specify a file which all job-related errors are written to in a machine-readable format (JSON). This is to make it easier for users to write batch processes to submit, download and track MWA ASVO jobs. 
    • Status
      colourBlue
      titleclient
       mwa_client now uses the argparse module instead of the deprecated optparse module to process command line arguments.
    • Status
      colourBlue
      titleclient
       Command line option -w | --download-only= now accepts "all" as well as a job id of 0 to mean- download any jobs which are available for download.

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June 2018

  • Fixes
    • Status
      colourYellow
      titlebackend
       changed the way internal worker processes communicate, in order to prevent the stdout errors such as "Invalid file object..." when running jobs.
  • Enhancements:
    • Status
      colourGreen
      titleweb
       all new job products will now have their sha1 hash calculated (you can see it under the "Download" button). To verify the integrity of your download, use an sha1 tool (for example sha1sum <filename>) to compare the expected versus the actual checksum.
    • Status
      colourBlue
      titleclient
       the sha1 hash is now displayed in the mwa_client when a download completes.
    • Status
      colourBlue
      titleclient
       the mwa_client will now display the file size (in bytes) of completed jobs along side the other job information when using the -l (--list-only) option

24

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June 2018

  • Enhancements:
    • Status
      colourBlue
      titleclient
       new command line options for mwa_client, allows you to submit jobs and exit (-s); list your jobs and exit (-l); download a job (-w JOBID); download all your jobs (-w 0). It still supports submitting, monitoring and blocking until all downloads are complete as it did before. See manta-ray-client github for the new options and examples.
    • Status
      colourBlue
      titleclient
       added an "example.csv" template to make it easier for new users to craft a csv file.
    • Status
      colourBlue
      titleclient
       minor updates to the output text, including a new option (-v) to show verbose output.

20

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June 2018

  • Fixes:
    • Status
      colourGreen
      titleweb
       Accessing a web page which requires the user to be logged in will now take them to a login page.
    • Status
      colourGreen
      titleweb
       On query page, "project" drop down is now sorted correctly and includes a short description (which is also searchable).
    • Status
      colourGreen
      titleweb
      Status
      colourYellow
      titlebackend
      Status
      colourBlue
      titleclient
       Fixed an issue where the "Jobs" page and the manta-ray-client did not allow the use of a non-integer time resolution setting. e.g. 0.5 would result in an error:  "Time resolution not of type integer".
    • Status
      colourGreen
      titleweb
       Fixed an issue where the query form is not showing all observations when performing a search.
    • Status
      colourBlue
      titleclient
       Fixed an issue where rerunning the manta-ray-client with the same csv file produces multiple jobs (which are all the same except for the order of the parameters), instead of 'reconnecting' to the existing job(s).
    • Status
      colourYellow
      titlebackend
       Fixed several issues when closing down processes.
    • Status
      colourYellow
      titlebackend
       The processor will explicitly ignore files in the archive which are not required for the data job. This will prevent errors like this: "MWA: 50 and NGAS: 51 file number mismatch; ignoring: 1066572736" from occurring.
  • Enhancements:
    • Status
      colourGreen
      titleweb
       Updated look and feel.
    • Status
      colourGreen
      titleweb
       Changed font to be much more readable for numbers.
    • Status
      colourGreen
      titleweb
       We've added a twitter feed (@mwa_asvo) to the front page which will be used to update users of any service status changes or issues to the MWA ASVO.
    • Status
      colourGreen
      titleweb
       Dates are now displayed in ISO 8601 format.
    • Status
      colourGreen
      titleweb
       Added Change Password feature.
    • Status
      colourGreen
      titleweb
       On query page, "from date" can be searched without "to date" and vice-versa.
    • Status
      colourGreen
      titleweb
       Upon registering, users will now be shown a message box telling them their registration is successful and that they will need to verify their email address. This should prevent users from clicking register multiple times.
    • Status
      colourGreen
      titleweb
       Added information about compliance with privacy policy.

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