EPICS Archiver Appliance / News: Recent posts

We recently upgraded a lot of dependent components to more recent releases. Builds with the upgraded dependencies have been tested for a couple of months. archappl_v0.0.1_SNAPSHOT_12-January-2015T10-47-05.tar.gz is the first public release with these updated components. Please do evaluate on your test systems before pushing to production.

Please let us know if you run into issues.

In the next build, in archappl.properties, I'll be setting
org.epics.archiverappliance.engine.util.EngineContext.disconnectCheckTimeoutInMinutes = 0

This turns off the pause/resume on disconnect functionality. In future, this functionality may be removed completely. With the recent builds of CAJ, this functionality is unnecessary.

Please let me know if you run into any issues.

As of today, we'll be using 1.1.14 of CAJ. Please let me know if you run into any issues.

Michael et al found a bug where we were establishing monitors with the wrong mask; this has since been fixed and a new release with the fix is available. We should now establish monitors solely with the DBE_ARCHIVE mask. Please let us know if you run into any issues.

The 05 February release starts a small refactoring of the engine component to improve connect/reconnect times and also to prepare for EPICS V4 integration. This will be done in stages; please let us know if you run into any issues.

Some small changes for taking into account paused PVS in the connection metrics.

Currently, we are sending the enum as a Java object; this may not be all that useful. So, I am changing this to a string. This is the toString() of the ArchDBRType. For example, 'DBR_SCALAR_DOUBLE' or 'DBR_WAVEFORM_INT'. I am also adding the element count as the variable 'elementCount'.

I'll be pushing this next release. Please let me know if this causes a big migration issue.

Small bug in data retrieval with ChannelArchiver integration when the ChannelArchiver data is sometime in the past. We use the start time of the request.This has been fixed in today's snapshot. There's probably some more work/refactoring to be done here but this should fix the bug if the start time of the request includes the end of ChannelArchiver data.

The archappl_v0.0.1_SNAPSHOT_10-October-2013T10-27-07.tar.gz build is the first snapshot that defaults to CAJ. This is still going thru production integration testing; please let us know if you encounter issues.

Some nasty bugs with changes in PV type have been fixed. For example, if something used to be a DBR_INT and now is a DBR_DOUBLE, we could get into issues where we were storing the data partially as an int and partially as a double. Added some checks to validate the type of the PV before writing into the STS. Also added a new report for events dropped by type changes.

We are still debating on the best way to handle type changes. Some choices are to convert (manually/automatically) but this may not be possible in all cases. Another choice is to clone/rename the PV so that the older data is accessible under an different but related name. Perhaps support both but have the IOC engineer choose. Please let us know if you have a preference.

Many of the post processing operators have been cleaned up to use standard terminology.
There are still a few more changes coming in for post processors but these should be mostly dealing with corner cases like consistent NaN treatment etc. The definitions should stay what they are today.

Fixed many bugs in the metrics pages - some of the metrics were incorrect after IOC reboots etc
Fixed the never connected PVS report to show PVs stuck in the archive workflow. Also added a button to abort the workflow
Made JCA the default to diagnose some reconnect issues.

Bug fix for the JSON response where the PV name is missing closing quotes in some cases.

I have added an install script that can be used to install on single machine. Please see the installation doc for more details. Please let me know if you run into any issues.

New build that fixes a couple of minor issues with the appliances page. Also fixed some bad URL's in all the pages.

Small bug where the filtering used was incorrectly handling cases where there was only one sample.

One can optionally use ARCHAPPL_POLICIES to specify the location of the policies file. Please see the install guide for more details.

A nasty bug with retrievals that span multiple years for PVs that have a low data rate was fixed.
A unit test to test various situations for PVs with low data rate has also been released.

I have uploaded another snapshot that fixes a regression that prevents the cluster to form when we are using localhost or we have a multi-homed machine. We are still in the process of testing this; but the snapshot I uploaded on Friday was broken.

I've uploaded a new snapshot release with JCA for linux 32 bit and 64 bit bundled in.