Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Chris Slominski <[email protected]> · Thu, 23 Feb 2012 11:10:09 -0500

I was thinking of a local solution for one process on one host, but I

will consider your global solution. I'm not sure I want every client

restarting their searches for disconnected channels.

  Thanks.

Ralph Lange wrote:

Chris,

You need a beacon anomaly that your clients can see, so they rebroadcast
their unresolved names.

Quick-and-dirty solution:
The easiest way to create a beacon anomaly is to start up an IOC. Create
an empty soft IOC on a machine on the clients' network (the softIoc
executable from base is fine). Set up a cron job that starts the IOC,
waits a second, then kills it.
Whenever that cron job runs, all clients on the local network will try
to resolve their channels.

~Ralph

On 23.02.2012 14:18, Chris Slominski wrote:

I want to be able to force my EPICS channel access client to begin a
new search for currently disconnected channels.We have small short
term pc104 iocs come and go and sometimes they are  not configured
correctly to broadcast when they have been booted up. A client
listening to the channels won't see a beacon anomaly and  begin the
channel search sequence.

I can see a couple of ways to do this.

- Send a network beacon to the CA Repeater.
- Issue a search for some non-existent channel.

Please advise on what is a good way to do this. Example code or
references to EPICS source code are very welcome, as I am neither
familiar with EPICS base software, nor am I an experienced network
programmer. My client software uses EPICS 3.13.10.

      Chris

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System