Re: [foxboro] Alarm Silence on Common Group Alarm Panels at 8.4.2

Jack, Cathy, and Russ,

    Jack, you probably already learned all of this the hard way like
we are learning it.  What did you decide to do?  Have you upgraded ALL
of your WS's to 8.4.2?

    At this point it appears that Foxboro changed a lot of stuff, (in
Ver.8.3 SOTM).  From what we can gather from TAC, they did this to
enable Solaris on the MESH workstations to co-exist on the MESH with
windows P91's and P92's. The changes apparently break the transport
socket communication on 8.3 and 8.4.2 boxes any time an 8.2 windows
workstation issues a Common Alarm Group Multi-cast. The Common Alarm
Group should continue to function correctly on all 8.2 Mesh
workstations but we were told by Tom Wiesnewski?? of TAC that as long
as an 8.2 WS using the CAG multicast was present on the MESH it would
break the socket used by the CAG on every 8.3 or 8.4.2 workstation.
Only when there are no more 8.2 CAG multicasts on the MESH, will the
8.3 and 8.4.2 CAG's be able to function. After installing Ver. 8.4.2
on some, but not all, of the P91/P92 boxes, here are the symptoms we
have seen:

The Current Alarm Display, (CAD), and Annunciator light updates will
not be successful between an 8.4.2 workstation being rebooted and it's
8.2 backup. The 8.2 backup box will display a message on the FV
message line saying it is trying to update the 8.4.2 WS but then it
displays a failure message. As a result, the 8.4.2 Annunciator lights
and CAD are blank at boot up. The 8.4.2 WS Annunciator and CAD will
receive new alarms from the CP's from that point forward but will not
be able to function as part of any Common Alarm Group. Silencing a
horn on the 8.2 WS in a CAG will silence the horn on other 8.2 WS's
defined in the CAG by sending a multicast that all WS's will have to
listen to and decide if it is for them. An 8.2 Multicast will cause
the 8.3 or 8.4.2 communication sockets to turn off/fail.   We are told
that rebooting the 8.4.2 WS or killing the AAServer.exe will repair
the socket as AAServer.exe respawns, but it will only work until the
next 8.2 Multicast happens across the MESH.

BTW, we installed the QF1011694 on the 8.4.2 station and it did not
fix the alarm backup recovery problem.

Russ, are you saying that to fix that, another quick fix has to be
installed on the 8.2 backup box also?

If the AIM Alarm Historian runs on an 8.2 P91 or P92 then 8.4.2 WS's
cannot receive alarm history on their Alarm History Display. It will
say the historian is not accessible in a dialog box. 8.2 WS's can
receive alarm history from an 8.2 historian. Conversely if the AIM
Alarm Historian runs on an 8.4.2 P91 or P92, then 8.2 WS's cannot
receive alarm history on their Alarm History Display but 8.4.2 WS's
can. We tested this extensively and that is our experience.

If someone else knows differently we would like to hear about it.

We cannot update all of our 8.2 WS's to 8.4.2 so we are only going to
upgrade a boot host to give us the FCP functionality we need and leave
the 8.2 operator WS's alone.

Regards,
Tom VandeWater
Control Conversions, Inc.
Kapolei, HI

On Thu, Mar 26, 2009 at 9:32 AM, Grace, Kathy
<kathy.grace@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>
> QF1011694 only fixed an alarm backup / recovery problem. It should not affect 
> annunciators.
> Kathy
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: foxboro-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:foxboro-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On 
> Behalf Of Boulay, Russ
> Sent: Wednesday, March 18, 2009 11:10 PM
> To: foxboro@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: Re: [foxboro] Alarm Silence on Common Group Alarm Panels at 8.4.2
>
> there is a alarm manager qf at v8.4.2 that fixes several issues ...new 
> aaserver QF1011694
>
> Also any combination of a V8.4.2 co-existing with a lesser version needs a QF 
> on the lesser version..
> ________________________________
>
> From: foxboro-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx on behalf of Jack.Easley@xxxxxxxxxxxx
> Sent: Wed 3/18/2009 10:30 PM
> To: foxboro@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: [foxboro] Alarm Silence on Common Group Alarm Panels at 8.4.2
>
> We just upgraded one Unit to MESH 8.4.2 from 8.2 and have encountered a
> problem with all Annuciator keyboards in this area being able to silence
> alarms from any WP in this area as still correctly defined in
> /usr/fox/wp/data/commgrp.cfg. The annunciator key-boards tied to the
> alarm destination WPs work fine, but the other annuciator keyboards on
> WPs not receiving alarms no longer silence alarms, even though they did
> at 8.2.
>
> Anyone else experience this problem yet?
>
> Jack Easley
> Sr. I&C Technician
> Luminant Power, Martin Lake Plant
> Phone 903.836.6241
> jack.easley@xxxxxxxxxxxx
 
 
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