Re: [foxboro] Maintaining Foxview displays on mixed Windows and Unix consoles

With Foxboro they're called "sidegrades", don't ya know?  We are trying to 
plan for DCS evolution, as much of our current hardware is unsupported, 
but it has been tough.  I'm still waiting to see if this WinMesh thing 
ever matures and stabilizes - and then I wonder if I will still be left 
wanting for functionality that some competitors already have.  I saw the 
SunMesh announcement, though, and got some comfort :)  I feel for you guys 
who had to jump into it now.

As for scripts, I've had more trouble going from Unix to Windows than from 
Bourne to Korn.  The biggest issue I've had is missing programs or 
different program locations and command-line formats on the Windows side, 
not the shell itself.  For the most part I just took the Unix script, 
turned on "set -x" (in the main script as well as any functions, 
unfortunately), tried it on Windows, and fixed a few things until it ran.


The other issue I've had is inconsistent DOS/Unix line termination on the 
Windows side, often from different Foxboro utilities.  The MKS shell seems 
to deal with either, and spits out Unix-style I believe (though that 
likely can be changed with some e-var options or something).  Generally 
I've just had to get into the habit of using Wordpad/Write to view/print 
the files instead of Notepad (which doesn't deal with Unix-style 
termination well).


The alarm history thing mentioned is a problem with any Windows WP and 
Unix AW (and probably vice versa), mesh or not, since it is a hack that 
involves reading the AW's almhist file over an rmount, which WinI/A does 
not support.  I'm working on my own hack^H^H^H^H possible solution to that 
as well, in my case to speed up alarm history access, but if it works I'll 
try it on my AW70 as well.  [Basically it involves sharing the almhist 
file via NFS or Samba over the 2nd ethernet, then defining the alarm 
history location in the init.user on the WPs to point to the shared 
directory.]


Corey Clingo
BASF Corporation






"Loudermilk, Virgil:" <Virgil.Loudermilk@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> 
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Re: [foxboro] Maintaining Foxview displays on mixed Windows and Unix 
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Thanks, Ed, that is very helpful, but as usual with me answers always
bring up more questions!

1.  We use external horns so we should be ok with silencing, but how
about acknowledging?  I assume that gets handled by the block, but will
the message get sent to the station without the common alarm group
working?  I assume it will but I don't know for sure.  And is there any
workaround for "Clear Alarm" not working?

2.  Alarm history won't hurt us, so that's ok.

3.  We do have some fairly involved Bourne shell scripts, so that could
be the biggest problem, especially since a Unix wiz contractor wrote
them and they will have to be modified by a less than wizardly plant
engineer!  Does anyone have any pointers on converting to Korn shell
scripts?

4.  Why does Invensys "upgrade" without transferring all the
functionality?  I can understand having to rewrite scripts, upgrades
always have some of that kind of pain, but totally losing an important
function like Common Alarm Groups? =20




 
 
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