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<== Date ==> <== Thread ==>

Subject: RE: channel access
From: "Mark Rivers" <[email protected]>
To: "Jeff Hill" <[email protected]>, "Dirk Zimoch" <[email protected]>
Cc: <[email protected]>
Date: Wed, 11 Jan 2006 13:41:05 -0600
Folks,

> > we have a problem with CA since we upgraded our MV2300 IOCs 
> to Tornado2.
> > 
> > After a reboot, often channel access links don't connect 
> immediately to
> > the server. They connect a few minutes later when this 
> message is printed:
> > 
> > CAC: Unable to connect port 5064 on "172.19.157.20:5064" because
> >   22="S_errno_EINVAL"

This is not just a problem with IOC to IOC sockets, but with any vxWorks
to vxWorks sockets.

We recently purchased a Newport XPS motor controller.  It communicates
over Ethernet, and uses vxWorks as it's operating system.  We control
the XPS from a vxWorks IOC. When we reboot our vxWorks IOC the XPS will
not communicate again after the IOC reboots, because it does not know
the IOC rebooted, and the same ports are being used.  It is thus
necessary to also reboot the XPS when rebooting the IOC.  But rebooting
the XPS requires re-homing all of the motors, which is sometimes almost
impossible because of installed equipment!  This is a real pain.

This problem goes away if we control the XPS with a non-vxWorks IOC,
such as Linux, probably because Linux closes the sockets when killing
the IOC.

On a related topic, I am appending an exchange I had with Jeff Hill and
others on this topic in October 2003, that was not posted to tech-talk.

Cheers,
Mark Rivers



Folks,

I'd like to revisit the problem of CA disconnects when rebooting a
vxWorks client IOC that has CA links to a vxWorks server IOC (that does
not reboot).

The EPICS 3.14.3 Release Notes say:

"Recent versions of vxWorks appear to experience a connect failure if
the vxWorks IP kernel reassigns the same ephemeral TCP port number as
was assigned during a previous lifetime. The IP kernel on the vxWorks
system hosting the CA server might have a stale entry for this ephemeral
port that has not yet timed out which prevents the client from
connecting with the ephemeral port assigned by the IP kernel.
Eventually, after EPICS_CA_CONN_TMO seconds, the TCP connect sequence is
aborted and the client library closes the socket, opens a new socket,
receives a new ephemeral port assignment, and successfully connects."

The last sentence is only partially correct.  The problem is that:
- vxWorks assigns these ephemeral port numbers in ascending numerical
order
- It takes a very long time for the server IOC to kill the stale entries

Thus, if I reboot the client many times in a row, it does not just
result in one disconnect before the succesful connection, but many.  I
just did a test where I rebooted a vxWorks client IOC 11 times, as one
might do when debugging IOC software.  This IOC is running Marty's
example sequence program, with 2 PVs connecting to a remote vxWorks
server IOC. 

Here is the amount of time elapsed before the sequence program PVs
connected:
Reboot #  Time (sec)
1           0.1
2           5.7
3            30
4            60
5            90
6           120
7            30
8           150
9           150
10          180
11          210

Here is the output of "casr" on the vxWorks server IOC that never
rebooted after client reboot #11.
Channel Access Server V4.11
164.54.160.74:1067(ioc13bma): User="iocboot", V4.11, Channel Count=1
Priority=80
164.54.160.100:4453(miata): User="dac_user", V4.8, Channel Count=461
Priority=0
164.54.160.75:1027(ioc13ida): User="iocboot", V4.11, Channel Count=1
Priority=80
164.54.160.101:3379(lebaron): User="dac_user", V4.8, Channel Count=18
Priority=0
164.54.160.73:1025(ioc13lab): User="iocboot", V4.11, Channel Count=2
Priority=0
164.54.160.73:1027(ioc13lab): User="iocboot", V4.11, Channel Count=2
Priority=0
164.54.160.73:1028(ioc13lab): User="iocboot", V4.11, Channel Count=2
Priority=0
164.54.160.73:1029(ioc13lab): User="iocboot", V4.11, Channel Count=2
Priority=0
164.54.160.73:1026(ioc13lab): User="iocboot", V4.11, Channel Count=2
Priority=0
164.54.160.73:1030(ioc13lab): User="iocboot", V4.11, Channel Count=2
Priority=0
164.54.160.73:1031(ioc13lab): User="iocboot", V4.11, Channel Count=2
Priority=0
164.54.160.111:55807(millenia.cars.aps.anl.gov): User="webmaster", V4.8,
Channel Count=291 Priority=0
164.54.160.73:1032(ioc13lab): User="iocboot", V4.11, Channel Count=2
Priority=0

There should only be one connection from the client, 164.54.160.73
(ioc13lab).  All but the highest numbered port (1032) are stale.  

The connection times do not increase by 30 seconds every single time,
because for some reason every once in a while one of the old port
connections times out (?) and is reused.  You can see that 1026 was
reused in the above test. But in general they do increase by 30 seconds
on each reboot.  

This situation makes it very difficult to do software development under
vxWorks in the case where CA connections to other vxWorks IOCs are used.
It starts to take 4 or 5 minutes for the CA connections to get
established.  Rebooting the server IOC is often not an option.

Here is a proposal for Jeff:

Would it be possible to create a new function named something like
vxCAClientStopAll.  This command would call close() on the CA
connections for all vxWorks CA clients, and hence would gracefully close
all of the socket connections on the server IOC.

We could then make another new vxWorks command, "restart" which does
vxCAClientStopAll();
reboot();

This would not solve the problem for hard reboots, but it would make it
possible in many cases to avoid these long delays in cases where an IOC
is being deliberately rebooted under software control.

Cheers,
Mark

Jeff's reply was:
Mark,


> - vxWorks assigns these ephemeral port numbers in ascending numerical
> order

That's correct there could be several of these stale circuits and the
system
will sequentially step through ephemeral port assignments timing out
each
one until an open slot is found. One solution would be for WRS to store
the
last ephemeral port assignment in non-volatile RAM between boots.

It's also true that this problem is mostly a development issue and not
an
operational issue because during operations machines typically stay in a
booted operational state for much longer than the stale circuit timeout
interval.

> - It takes a very long time for the server IOC to kill the stale 
> entries

Yes, that's true. I do turn on the keep-alive timer, but it has a very
long
delay by default. This delay *can* however be changed globally for all
circuits.

I don't know what RTEMS does, but I strongly suspect that windows, UNIX,
and
VMS systems hang up all connected circuits when the system is software
rebooted.

Therefore, we have a vxWorks and possibly an RTEMS specific problem. 

> Would it be possible to create a new function named something like
> vxCAClientStopAll.  This command would call close() on the CA
> connections for all vxWorks CA clients, and hence would 
> gracefully close all of the socket connections on the server IOC.
>

Of course ca_context_destroy() and ca_task_exit() are fulfilling a
similar,
but context specific role. They do however shutdown only one context at
a
time, and the context identifier is private to the context.

So perhaps we should do this:

Implement an iocCore shutdown module where subsystems register for
callback
when iocCore is shutdown. There would be a command line function that
users
call to shutdown an IOC gracefully. This command line would call all of
the
callbacks in the LIFO order. The sequencer and the database links would
of
course call ca_context_destroy() in their IOC core shutdown callbacks.

Jeff


Replies:
RE: channel access Ernest L. Williams Jr.

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