Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

"Ernest L. Williams Jr." <[email protected]> · Wed, 05 Apr 2006 09:50:40 -0400

On Wed, 2006-04-05 at 11:56 +0200, Matthias Clausen wrote:
> Back from my trip to eclipsecon and my visit at SLAC - thanks to the 
> organizers of the little eclispe/XAL workshop I want to summarize where 
> we are with the alarm message approach.
> 
> 
> >   
> >> For the future we want to change the alh message stream from opt-in (as 
> >> it is now) to opt-out - any alarm will be sent from the IOC to an alarm 
> >> queue. 
> >>     
> > Following the idea of iocLogServer?  This is a really good idea; what is
> > your time frame?
> >   
> To implement this feature we will need the right hook into IOC-core to 
> make sure that we will catch all alarms generated on an IOC. There has 
> been a discussion on tech-talk already about this subject:
> 
> http://www.aps.anl.gov/epics/tech-talk/2005/msg00809.php
> 
> The discussion going on there is a good starting point to find out which 
> implementation would be the 'right' one.
> There's one implementation (or is it really a hack?) for the D0 IOC's
> There's the proposal from Andrei and the comments from Kay.
> Did someone else already think about this and what are the results?
> In any case we will need an implementation which is EPICS-core 
> compatible and will in the end make it into one of the next EPICS versions.
> - Point (1) on the to do list.
> 
> Second is the implementation on the iocAlarmMessage task on the IOC.
> These are the mandatory functions:
> - Receive triggers from record processing that an alarm has been raised
> - Retrieve alarm information from record and prepare the alarm message
> - (We are currently working on the necessary properties for alarm 
> messages and messages in general. This list will be close to the cmlog 
> approach)
> - Write alarm message to message queue (fixed size - no malloc/free here 
> ;-) )
> - Write messages to message servers (one at a time)
> - Implement redundant paths to redundant message servers
> - Point (2) on the to do list
> (This might a quick one because we have implemented a lot of these 
> features already for the caPutLog tasks on the IOC.)
> 
> The message server will forward the messages to the JMS message server.
> - Point (3) on the to do list
> 
> The messages will get written to the Oracle database by a message client 
> receiving the messages from the alarm message queue.
> - Point (4) on the to do list
> (This will be implemented in due time)
> 
> 
> Message display and acknowledge
> -----------------------------------------------
> 
> Displaying messages from the (Oracle) archive
> Implemented in eclipse-BIRT - is one of the results of the eclipsecon!
> 
> Displaying online messages:
> Open questions:
> - What shall the hierarchy look like?
> - How to configure the hierarchy? (using the existing alhConfig files?
> - How to implement acknowledge alarms?
> - What kind of filters are currently used/ necessary - or missing?
> - Point (5) on the to do list
> 
> Alarm actions:
> What kind of actions are necessary?
> - Sending mail
> - Sending SMS messages
> - Send speech messages
> - Changing values on the same - or other - records
> - Point (6) on the to do list
> 
> So in the end we have - at least - 6 action points.
> We plan to work on them during this year to get at least the basic 
> features running.
> We can speed up the process if others step in and we work on it 
> collaboratively ;-))
> 
> Does this answer the question?
> > what is
> > your time frame?

Yes, awesome.

> 
> 
> >> This way you will run a system process in the background which 
> >> makes sure that any alarm from an IOC (independent of any configuration 
> >> file) will be written to e.g. Oracle or a file.
> >>
> >>     
> > I saw an option in the current alarmhandler to write to ORACLE. hmmm?
> >   
> Yes it's being used here for some of the alarm handlers.
> But also this approach relies on running alarm handlers (with the same 
> dependencies) writing through a message queue to an Oracle service 
> writing the alarm messages to the database.
> >
> > By the way have you thought about having the AlarmHandler speak
> > messages?
> >   
> For now we just send SMS messages.
> Since Nokia joined the eclipse foundation we might get an easy way in 
> the future to send text messages to GSM phones. Also the text to speech 
> package in eclipse is really interesting to implement something in this 
> regime.
> But - it's at least not our list for now.
> In the overall design it would 'just' be another message client 
> converting message strings into speech messages and calling the on call 
> shift...
> > We are playing with text annunciation (on miniMAC) here at the SNS.
> >
> >   
> We might discuss future alarm message designs during the upcoming EPICS 
> workshop...
> Maybe we can form an interest-group before?

This would be great timing for the upcoming EPICS meeting.  Can we setup
a workshop?  Bob/Ned what do you think?

Thanks,
Ernest

> 
> -Matthias
> 

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System