Problem with sessions

[Emma Ivansson]

I have used the “sessions” functionality extensively in a previous position, I recently changed jobs and needed to store sessions again. I created a new ucsc account for this in order to get my new email address (and also because I did not remember the details of my old account). My problem is that the sessions don’t work as they used to. I can only see one session in the “My sessions” despite having stored two sessions. Could you please tell me what’s causing this problem? It’s quite unsettling since I can’t be sure the sessions are actually stored.

I noted that I was redirected to the European mirror and I don’t think that has happened in the past.

Please advise, I’m quite dependent on the sessions feature working propely
Thanks
Emma Ivansson

[Matthew Speir]

Hi Emma,

Thank you for your question about saving sessions using the UCSC Genome
Browser. The European server was launched this past year to make access
to the UCSC Genome Browser faster for users in Europe. Even though you
have one account that can be used to log in and save sessions on both
the US server and the European Server, the sessions that you create on
each of these servers are separate. After looking in our databases, I
can see that you have two accounts associated with your email. On the US
server, each of these accounts has one associated session. On the
European server, one account has one session associated with it, and the
other has three sessions (some of which appear to be test sessions). Is
it possible that you created two accounts, and forgot which account you
used to save your two sessions?

I hope this is helpful. If you have any further questions, please reply
to gen...@soe.ucsc.edu. All messages sent to that address are archived
on a publicly-accessible Google Groups forum. If your question includes
sensitive data, you may send it instead to genom...@soe.ucsc.edu.

Matthew Speir
UCSC Genome Bioinformatics Group

[Emma Ivansson]

Hi Matthew, thank you for your reply. What happened was that I created a new account and then I couldn’t store multiple sessions. I therefore created another account and tried again, that’s why there are two accounts, I had the problem before I created the second account. At first I experienced similar problems but now it works. I understand now that the problem was that one session was on the US and one on the European server, I see that when I’m redirected to the European there are three sessions stored but when I choose to go back to the US then there’s only one. I do think this is inconvenient… but I assume there are technical reasons behind it. I managed to find the “mirrors” tab which will be helpful to avoid these problems and figured out how to transfer a session from one server to the other (loading it, then switching to the other mirror and storing it).
Thanks for your help
Emma

[robert kuhn]

Hello, Emma,

> I do think this is inconvenient... but I assume there are technical
reasons
> behind it.

We agree that this situation is inconvenient, but thanks for understanding.
We built genome-euro to make genome browsing faster over there, and
carefully considered the tradeoffs between allowing the two machines to
diverge at the Session-storage function vs keeping them in sync.

Because we believed that most researchers would use one or the other
machine and not very often find themselves on the other machine, the cost
of the very large storage and transmission to keep them in sync was not
justified. Our hosts at the University of Bielefeld are generous with
their
support of the European mirror, and we chose to not stress their bandwidth
with the constant syncing of data between the two sites.

We were about to contact you again to suggest that you sync up your
sessions in one place using save/reload, but are happy to see that you
found that solution on your own.

best regards, and thanks for using the Genome Browser.

--b0b kuhn
ucsc genome bioinformatics group

On 8/27/2014 12:17 AM, Emma Ivansson wrote:
> Hi Matthew, thank you for your reply. What happened was that I created a new account and then I couldn't store multiple sessions. I therefore created another account and tried again, that's why there are two accounts, I had the problem before I created the second account. At first I experienced similar problems but now it works. I understand now that the problem was that one session was on the US and one on the European server, I see that when I'm redirected to the European there are three sessions stored but when I choose to go back to the US then there's only one. I do think this is inconvenient... but I assume there are technical reasons behind it. I managed to find the "mirrors" tab which will be helpful to avoid these problems and figured out how to transfer a session from one server to the other (loading it, then switching to the other mirror and storing it).