Re: EPICS: Selecting a Text Error Message

[Maren Purves <m.purves@jach.hawaii.edu>]

David,

a few minor additions:

Ralph Lange wrote:
> One is to have 235 stringouts with the messages sitting there, with 
> their OUT links all pointing to the same stringin that holds the current 
> error message. A bunch of CALC records would do the divisions/modulo 
> operations to fire the matching stringout. For 235, this database gets a 
> bit ugly and large...
> The other one is to use a genSub for the conversion - within your C code 
> you can do anything you want, including a lookup table.

if you then get the content of that record into a file you can mail
the file ...

Only slightly less messy, and a bit more involved: You can put the
alarm on a display screen and the alarm handler can send the service
person a message to run up that display screen - which only works
as long as that person has access to running up a display screen. -

> For the email alert it sounds like the Alarm Handler would be the tool 
> of choice. It can be configured to run user written scripts on alarm 
> severity change - these scripts can do anything, including sending 
> emails or cell phone text messages. I don't know if your environment 
> allows you to run an ALH for this particular IOC, though. I'm not sure 
> if anyone ever had the IOC itself send out email.

The IOC has to boot from somewhere. If nothing else you can run the
alarm handler on the boot host with the X-interface on your desktop.
I run 12 of hours on a machine at the telescope with the X widgets
(silenced forever, but that doesn't really matter in my case as the
sound is disabled on my desk top) on my desk top. All those alarm
handlers do is send email (we consider that sufficient). The IOCs
those channels are on aren't quite as far away as David's, it's only
about 35 miles in our case, but our motivation was the same, especially
for weekends when there are no people working during the day.

Maren