Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Florian Feldbauer via Tech-talk <[email protected]> · Mon, 8 Jul 2019 08:58:33 +0200

Dear all,

at the collaboration meeting last month I presented, that we are looking

into Docker containers for deploying and managing our EPICS

installations for the PANDA experiment.

I have now tested several things with containers for IOCs, ca-gateway,

phoebus and the archive-engine (from phoebus).

@Heinz: During the meeting you asked how the containers get access to

network devices: Actually, this is quiet easy. if you use the bridge

network driver from Docker for the virtual network your containers live in,

NATing is enabled by default. (Otherwise CMS which are usually run

inside of containers could not get their updates ;-) ). So even if you

run mutliple IOCs on the same host, accessing network devices is no problem.

For access those IOCs via CA from a remote host you need a CA gateway as

well. I also tested access to serial devices with asyn+stream.

One thing which is not working for me at the moment is PVaccess. For CA

i add the option `-p 5064-5065:5064-5065 -p 5064-5065:5064-5065/udp` to

publish the CA ports of my container (either IOC or ca-gateway) to the

outside world.

For PVaccess I tried with `-p 5075:5075 -p 5076:5076/udp` but this was

not working. Accessing the IOC from the host directly (via the virual

network) works. So the IOC has a PVaccess server.

Did I miss some important ports for PVaccess or is this protocol working

differently when establishing connections?

The IOC is connected to a virtual network with its own IP address. The

ports are mapped to the physical ports of my host system. The remote

client only "sees" the physical connection of my host.

If anyone is interested in this work let me know! We will establish our

own docker registry server soon, where the images will be made available.

Best regards,
Florian

--
Dr. Florian Feldbauer

Ruhr-Universität Bochum
Experimentalphysik I AG
Universitätsstr. 150
Fach-Nr. 125
D-44801 Bochum

Office: NB 2/134
Phone:  (+49)234 / 32-23563
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https://paluma.ruhr-uni-bochum.de