Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Gerrit Kühn <[email protected]> · Wed, 23 Feb 2011 17:25:20 +0100

Hi all,

Recently I tried to run epics under FreeBSD for the first time. I have a
fairly recent FreeBSD 8.1-something and the latest epics 3.14.12.
Compilation went without any problem. However, I cannot get any PVs from
my network with caget on the FreeBSD machine, they all give me "Channel
connect timed out".
For testing purposes I started a softIOC of the FreeBSD machine. PVs from
this softIOC can be seen just fine from other Linux machines in the net
using caget. But on the FreeBSD machine itself I still only get the
timeout.
Then I included the machine's IP explicitely into EPICS_CA_ADDR_LIST. After
this, I could get the PV coming from my local softIOC. But even adding
another IOC's address in the network to EPICS_CA_ADDR_LIST did not let me
resolve any of its PVs with caget from the FreeBSD machine.
This made be suspicious that something with broadcasting might be wrong.
And indeed I could fix the problem by setting EPICS_CA_ADDR_LIST
explicitely to the broadcast address of my subnet (192.168.95.255, which
might be a bit unusual, but has never caused any problems so far with
Linux machines).

Is there anything different with the handling of broadcasts and/or
interfaces when using FreeBSD? Linux just works out-of-the-box and does
not require setting EPICS_CA_ADDR_LIST.

cu
  Gerrit

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System