Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

"Jeff Hill" <[email protected]> · Wed, 23 Feb 2011 12:08:12 -0700

Hi Gerrit,

Make certain that the netmasks for the network interfaces in your FreeBSD
system match the networks to which they are attached. See also the
"Troubleshooting" portion of the CA reference manual.

If there are not routing issues, then I suspect that something is amiss with
the code in EPICS base which we use to interrogate the broadcast address
used by each network interface. This code runs when EPICS_CA_AUTO_ADDR_LIST
is YES. For POSIX, reference src/libCom/osi/os/default/osdNetIntf.c. We have
occasionally needed to make some minor changes here before because socket
library interface changes were not backwards compatible.

When running a soft IOC on this FreeBSD system, what does casr, with a high
interest level (i.e. casr 100), show? There should be a list of network
addresses listed there - which are the server's beacon destinations. When
EPICS_CAS_AUTO_BEACON_ADDR_LIST is YES (the default) the code in
src/libCom/osi/os/default/osdNetIntf.c is used to populate this list of
beacon destination addresses.

Jeff
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> -----Original Message-----
> From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]]
> On Behalf Of Gerrit Kühn
> Sent: Wednesday, February 23, 2011 9:25 AM
> To: [email protected]
> Subject: epics on FreeBSD: broadcast problem
> 
> 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