EOX ship - checklist
BOX - beginning of expedition
EOX - end of expedition
About EOX
The outgoing programmer(s) is(are) responsible for all EOX activities.
The first goal is to ensure a good copy of the data gets back to HQ.
An equally important goal is to leave laboratory and data management systems in an operational state for hand-off to your counterparts.
Please read this entire document and EOX ship - rationale and FAQ. Expect to take 3 to 4 hours to complete this exercise. While the database dump can occur in 20 min for 61 GiB--operational decisions and technical staff concerns with their portion of the data management will take time to address.
The process has been much simplified. Do not hurry. If you are "fried"--work together.
Checklist / Overview
Deliver the end-of-expedition report to the LO (that you have been writing throughout the expedition). Post a copy to the development team via Slack. See examples from prior technical reports for formats and variations.
Establish with MCS, LOs, CoChiefs when the final database snapshot will be taken for EOX.
Spot check data copy efforts. What data didn’t get into the database? To data1?
Honor moratorium. Once content is uploaded to LIMS, and raw files have gone to data1, expedition-specific data may be cleaned off of instrument hosts and workstations. Good practice to confer with technical staff that manage this for their labs. There is variance between crews as to how these procedures are carried out.
Conduct end of expedition procedures for backing up the database.
Provide courier services if called upon to do so.
Confirm with the MCS what is to be included in the backup going to shore and that it does cover all the information you are aware of that should go to shore.
Ensure all your code changes are checked in.
Clean the development office. Assist in the general cleaning efforts.
Be ready to move out. Your replacement will be here soon.
Provide assistance and information to oncoming developers.
Oncoming personnel expect functional laboratory and compute systems for successful execution of the new expedition.
Assist with those goals.
Out of Scope
These checklist items are included to raise situational awareness, but are not in the responsibility of the offgoing developers. However, they are dependent on what you do. Other actors than the developers are responsible for these equally critical activities. The sooner done, the sooner accessible. Under routine circumstances we promote a two-week turn-around time for making shipboard gathered content available in shore systems.
Retrieve data content from tape. Distribute it to Publications, Data Librarian, DBA, Operations, and public access storage locations. - Systems
Restore (routinely selected) database content from the full backup to the shore production transfer schema. - DBA
Establish moratorium credentials and controls for the expedition data. - DBA
Copy the content into the publicly accessible LIMS. - DBA
Update the Database Overview configuration to summarize the added content. - DBA