Hi,
We've experienced issues on both the RIO, and 4000 series controllers. The 21x3 series did not seem to have this issue. I've not seen the issue on the DMC-30000 series either.
At ANSTO, for each beamline network we created a "non routed" (NR) VLAN for the Galil equipment.
The NR VLAN MTU has been modified to 1522 bytes maximum. Our IOC's are created on a PROXMOX VM cluster and each IOC host has a network interface on the beamline VLAN, and on the NR VLAN too. Our IOC's run CentOS 6/7/8.
OPI machines use the main beamline VLAN network, and communicate with the IOC's through this network too. Channel access traffic is not on the NR VLAN where the Galil units are located. All camera's are put on isolated networks (They use jumbo frames
often, big no no!). We use the IB/IK command to block ports, and put arp rules on machines that should access the Galil equipment. Beware if the host has no arp rule, the
Galil will not be found on the network (very common!). After all this special action, our RIO's and 4000 series units have been stable for several years. A firewall
is another good recommendation.
The Galil EPICS driver was written for Ethernet, and serial. However, Ethernet is recommended for best responsiveness, if you can get it stable.
Some of the issues reported sound like firmware, others it's not certain. I'll investigate if IOC start is causing any issues, and see what can be done.
If autosave is running (recommended), during restore, the traffic to the controller is high at IOC start.
Galil 40x0 firmware 1.2H contains some network fixes, I'm not sure about other versions on 40x0. A similar firmware fix was crafted for the 41x3 (maybe 1.2E?).
It's thought that whilst decoding the network packet, the controller can run out of RAM and crash. Modern networks can have an MTU up to 9312 bytes. Modern
camera's aim to have large MTU's. For the Galil units an MTU of 1522 bytes is recommended. You may need to contact the network engineer at your site to help configure the network VLAN, firewall, and MTU configuration.
Also, contacting Galil about this issue, could help us all.! :)
Kind regards,
Mark
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