Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Marty Kraimer <[email protected]> · Mon, 28 Feb 2005 07:52:29 -0600

huangsong wrote:

>Hi, everyone,
>
>Is there any command to set the time of IOC? Just like 'date' on Linux, e.g. we use 'date -s 20050228' to set the current date to 2005/02/28.
>
>Best wishes and regards,
>Huang,song 黄松
>  
>

No.

How an IOC finds the date/time depends on the plafform.

On everything except vxWorks it uses platform supplied facilities for
date/time support.
Thus the rest of this message only applys to vxWorks IOCs.

On vxWorks the way date/time is obtained depends on if the IOC has a
hardware event system. It it does what happens depends on how
TSdriverInit is configured. This gets complicated. From your request I
will assume that you do NOT have a hardware event system. In this case
vxWorks requires an NTP (Network Time Protocal) server. The address of
the server is determined as follows:

If EPICS_TS_NTP_INET is defined it is used. If not it attempts to use
it's boot server as an ntp timeserver.

Error messages will be generated if it can not receive time from the NTP
server.

Contacting an NTP server is sufficient for epics time stamps, which is
how Channel Access clients obtain time. If you want to convert a time
stamp to an ASCII string on the IOC itself, for example issuing the date
command, then you must also set TIMEZONE (3.13) or EPICS_TIMEZONE
(3.14). A recent tech-talk message discussed TIME_ZONE and EPICS_TIMEZONE.

EPICS_TS_NTP_INET and EPICS_TIMEZONE are in CONFIG_SITE_ENV.

I hope this helps,

Marty Kraimer

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System