Re: AlarmHandler as a daemon or service

[Brian Bevins <bevins@jlab.org>]

Ernest L. Williams Jr. wrote:
> Two questions:
>
> (1) How many sites used the EPICS AlarmHandler.
>
> (2) Has anyone changed the EPICS AlarmHandler to run in daemon mode or
> as a service?
>
> This would be a useful mode when the logging option is used.
>
> So, basically we would need a commandline option to enable this and give
> us an alhLogger, ah?

Ernest,

I gave a talk at the collaboration meeting last spring about our use of 
the alarm handler at Jefferson Lab. You can read the slides here:

http://www-ssrl.slac.stanford.edu/lcls/epics/Talks/ThurAM/Bevins_Epics2005April_Alarms.ppt

Basically, we run an instance of alh on a dedicated machine which makes 
the audible alarms in the control room and logs to CMLOG. Operators run 
local instances of alh to acknowledge alarms, get guidance for alarms, 
etc. We generate our config files automatically in perl and we have a 
Tcl/Tk based tool that allows for masking off alarms from portions of 
the machine that are not active using PV's hosted in a Proxy IOC. (The 
PIOC is a local development that uses the pcas to serve PVs that are 
created/deleted on demand for "sponsoring" clients.)

There are various enhancements to Cdev and alh that we made to support 
this configuration, which I promised to release. That should happen Real 
Soon Now....

--Brian

--
Brian S. Bevins, PE
Computer Scientist / Mechanical Engineer
Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility

     "Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness.
      Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
                                                     -- George Santayana