Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Brian Bevins <[email protected]> · Thu, 30 Mar 2006 12:58:03 -0500

Ernest L. Williams Jr. wrote:

Two questions:
(1) How many sites used the EPICS AlarmHandler.
(2) Has anyone changed the EPICS AlarmHandler to run in daemon mode or
as a service?
This would be a useful mode when the logging option is used.
So, basically we would need a commandline option to enable this and give
us an alhLogger, ah?

Ernest,
I gave a talk at the collaboration meeting last spring about our use of
the alarm handler at Jefferson Lab. You can read the slides here:
http://www-ssrl.slac.stanford.edu/lcls/epics/Talks/ThurAM/Bevins_Epics2005April_Alarms.ppt
Basically, we run an instance of alh on a dedicated machine which makes
the audible alarms in the control room and logs to CMLOG. Operators run
local instances of alh to acknowledge alarms, get guidance for alarms,
etc. We generate our config files automatically in perl and we have a
Tcl/Tk based tool that allows for masking off alarms from portions of
the machine that are not active using PV's hosted in a Proxy IOC. (The
PIOC is a local development that uses the pcas to serve PVs that are
created/deleted on demand for "sponsoring" clients.)
There are various enhancements to Cdev and alh that we made to support
this configuration, which I promised to release. That should happen Real
Soon Now....
--Brian
--
Brian S. Bevins, PE
Computer Scientist / Mechanical Engineer
Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility
     "Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness.
      Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
                                                     -- George Santayana

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System