Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

"Allison, Stephanie" <[email protected]> · Fri, 24 Mar 2006 08:42:05 -0800

Hi Ernest,

At SPEAR, we run one "standalone" ALH which is started at system reboot.  In order to get around the need for an X terminal, it uses Xfvb (Virtual Framebuffer X Server) which is started before the standalone ALH.  The purpose of this ALH is simply to send alarms to cmlog.  It's started with these options:

To use Xfvb:
    setenv DISPLAY :1.0

#             -oCM = log operator mods to CMLOG
#             -wCM = wordy CMLOG messages
#             -aCM = log alarms to CMLOG
#             -m 2000 = max number of alarms in the alarm file
#             -s = silent
#             -S = passive
#             -noerrorpopup 
#             -l $ALHLOGFILES    = where log files are
#             -f $ALHCONFIGFILES = where config files are
#             -a Alarms.log = name of alarm log files
#             -o OpMods.log = name of op mod log files

I left the Alarms.log and OpMods.log for my own use.

(BTW - the "wordy" option was added since we wanted more information in the text).

I added a special cmlog browser to take messages from the cmlogServer as they come and send them to a server on our RDB machine that sticks them into RDB so we can see alarm events (along with events from our other clients like channelWatcher and other monitoring programs) from the web.  Maybe someday we get rid of cmlogServer and have ALH and channelWatcher log directly to the RDB server.

Works OK for us except our version of ALH is very old and has bugs which are most probably fixed in the newer version.  When I get some time, I'll upgrade.

Stephanie Allison
SPEAR/SSRL and LCLS/SLAC

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System