Re: SoftIOC console access under Windows?

[Ralph Lange <Ralph.Lange@bessy.de>]

Hi Mark,

we use Conserver for access to both our VME and soft IOCs, the latter run in the Screen environment on a Linux host. (I have been discussing this in more detail recently on tech-talk and set up a Wiki page, so I'm keeping it short here.)

For different reasons (the mentioned recent tech-talk thread), I'm working on replacing Screen with procServer (developed at SNS), which is a very slim and straightforward environment for running soft IOCs, that promises to be more stable and appropriate to be run under Conserver.
Since even after that change our Windows soft IOCs remain console-less, I'm trying to find out what to do about that. Getting the procServer running on Windows seems worth a try. If not natively, maybe under Cygwin. If even that fails, Screen under Cygwin would be there as a third option.

I'll keep you posted.

Cheers,
Ralph


Mark Bennett wrote:

Hi Ralph,

For our standard environment of Linux based soft IOCs, we start up the IOC using the "screen" utility and access the box (and the screen session) via SSH. (You don't mention what your standard text based environment is.)

We have only a couple of Windows based IOCs at this stage, and have not yet had a need to replicate this standard "screen" approach. However, your query has prompted me to see some definite benefits. So far, we have installed Cygwin/SSH for text based maintenance but this does not include starting the IOC. (Cygwin is a UNIX environment running on top of Windows). Cygwin is capable of starting win32 apps - you should not need to recompile your IOCs for cygwin-x86 specifically in order to run them. I believe using the screen utility under Cygwin could be an option worth exploring, although I have never tested it.

Let me know if you need more detail and please advise us of your final solution.

regards,

Mark Bennett
Deputy Controls Manager
Australian Synchrotron