Re: abdf1 driver that logs with logMsg? - I know this is a real long shot

[Maren Purves via Tech-talk <tech-talk at aps.anl.gov>]

Thank you Mark,

yes, I do have the source code, but those print statements are in state notation code rather than in the driver. I can try replacing the printf in there.

I did not know that there is a way around only one person being able to access a terminal server (I assume that works the same way for console switches?) at a time.

Our telescope operators open a telnet session to each of the iocs at the start of the night in case they need to reboot one. Does the one prevent the other?

Thanks, will have to look into details later (it's not the only problem we're having at the moment),

Maren

Maren Purves
Head of Instrument and Telescope Software
East Asian Observatory / JCMT

On Sat, Jan 21, 2023 at 5:47 AM Mark Rivers <rivers at cars.uchicago.edu> wrote:

Hi Maren,

I assume you don't have access to the source code for the abdf1 driver, so you can't change the printf() to logMsg()?

We log the console output on all of our vxWorks systems as follows:

• Connect the console serial port to an Ethernet terminal server.
• Run the procServ program on a Linux machine.  Here is an example of the command used to start one of them:

/usr/local/bin/procServ --logstamp -n "13IDA_IOC" -L /home/epics/logs/13IDA.log 20024 /usr/bin/telnet gsets2.cars.aps.anl.gov 4004

That does the following:

• Connects to the terminal server gsets2 via telnet on port 4004
• Logs all of the console output to the file /home/epics/logs/13IDA.log
• Allows multiple users on the Linux system to connect to the console port at the same time using the command:

telnet localhost 20024

The log file has a timestamp on every line, so you can see when error messages were generated.  Here is an example:

[Fri Jan 20 09:17:14 2023] sevr=minor Motor motion timeout ERROR on card: 2, signal: 0

This solution won't put the log output in the same place that logMsg would, but at least it will be on your Linux server where you can search it.

Mark

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From: Tech-talk <tech-talk-bounces at aps.anl.gov> on behalf of Maren Purves via Tech-talk <tech-talk at aps.anl.gov>
Sent: Saturday, January 21, 2023 2:59 AM
To: EPICS tech-talk <tech-talk at aps.anl.gov>
Subject: abdf1 driver that logs with logMsg? - I know this is a real long shot

 

Hi all,

we have an EPICS ioc (ppc604, mvme5100 to be exact) that connects to an Alle Bradley PLC using the abdf1 driver. We have some errors recorded from state notation language but that only goes into the buffer of the console switch. We use logMsg (not sure exactly where that comes from) to write to a nightly EPICS.log which is much easier to access than the console switch that only allows one connection at a time.

The abdf1 version used dates back to 2011, and we're still running EPICS 3.13.8 on VxWorks 5.5. While I'd like to upgrade to EPICS 7 and for many (at least the monitoring) things softIocs we don't have the effort to do that in a more than very piecemeal way, if at all.

TIA,

Maren Purves
Head of Instrument and Telescope Software
East Asian Observatory / JCMT