177 lines
6.6 KiB
HTML
177 lines
6.6 KiB
HTML
<html>
|
|
<head>
|
|
<title>SICS Trouble Shooting</title>
|
|
</head>
|
|
<body>
|
|
|
|
<h1>SICS Trouble Shooting </h1>
|
|
<hr size=4 width="66%">
|
|
<p>
|
|
There is no such thing as bug free software. There are always bugs, nasty
|
|
behaviour etc. This document shall help to solve these problems. The usual
|
|
symptom will be that a client cannot connect to the server or the server is
|
|
not responding. Or error messages show up. This section helps to solve such
|
|
problems.
|
|
</p>
|
|
<h2>Looking at Log Files</h2>
|
|
<p>
|
|
The first thing to do, especially when confronted with confusing statements
|
|
from either users or instrument scientists, is to look at the SICS servers
|
|
log files. The last 1000 lines of the instrument log are accessible from
|
|
any SICS client or through the WWW interface. The SICS commands:
|
|
<dl>
|
|
<dt>commandlog tail
|
|
<dd> shows the last 20 lines of the log.
|
|
<dt>commandlog tail n
|
|
<dd>shows the last n lines of the log.
|
|
</dl>
|
|
will show you the information available. In order to see more, log in to the
|
|
instrument account. There the following unix commands might help:
|
|
<ul>
|
|
<li><b>sicstail</b> shows the last 20 lines of the current log file and its
|
|
name
|
|
<li><b>sicstail n</b> shows the last n lines of the current log file.
|
|
</ul>
|
|
In order to see some more, cd into the log directory of the instrument
|
|
account. In there are files with names like:
|
|
<pre>
|
|
auto2001-08-08@00-01-01.log
|
|
</pre>
|
|
This means the log file has been started at August, 8, 2001 at 00:01:01.
|
|
There is a new log file daily. Load appropriate files into the editor and
|
|
look what really happened.
|
|
</p>
|
|
<p>
|
|
Another good ideas is to use the unix command grep on assorted log
|
|
files. A grep for the strings ERROR or WARNING will more ofteh then
|
|
not give an indication for the nature of the problem.
|
|
</p>
|
|
<p>
|
|
The log files show you all commands given and all the responses of the system.
|
|
Additionally there are hourly time stamps in the file which allow to narrow
|
|
in when the problem started. Things to watch out for are:
|
|
<dl>
|
|
<dt>MOTOR ALARM
|
|
<dd>This message means that the motor failed to reach his position for a
|
|
couple of times. This is caused by either a concrete shielding element
|
|
blocking the movement of the instrument, badly adjusted motor parameters,
|
|
mechanical failures or the air cushions not operating properly.
|
|
<dt>EL734__BAD_EMERG_STOP
|
|
<dd>Somebody has pushed the emergency stop button. This must be released
|
|
before the instrument can move again. Moreover the motor controller will
|
|
not respond to further commands in this mode. Thus restarting SICS on this
|
|
error message will make SICS fail to initialize the motors affected!
|
|
<dt>EL***__BAD_PIPE, BAD_RECV, BAD_ILLG, BAD_TMO, BAD_SEND
|
|
<dd>Network communication problems. Can generaly be solved by restarting
|
|
SICS.
|
|
<dt>EL737__BAD_BSY
|
|
<dd>A counting operation was aborted while the beam was off. Unfortunately,
|
|
the counter box does not respond to commands in this state and ignores the
|
|
stop command sent to it during the abort operation. This can be
|
|
safely ignored, SICS fixes this condition.
|
|
</dl>
|
|
</p>
|
|
<h2>Restarting SICS</h2>
|
|
<p>
|
|
All of SICS can be restarted through the command:
|
|
<pre>
|
|
monit restart all
|
|
</pre>
|
|
</p>
|
|
<h2>Starting SICS</h2>
|
|
<p>
|
|
An essential prerequisite of SICS is that the server is up
|
|
and running. The system is configured to restart the SICServer whenever it
|
|
fails. Only after a reboot or when the keepalive processes were killed (see
|
|
below) the SICServer must be restarted. This is done for all instruments by
|
|
typing:
|
|
<pre>
|
|
monit
|
|
</pre>
|
|
at the command prompt. startsics actually starts two programs: one is
|
|
the replicator application which is responsible for the automatic
|
|
copying of data files to the laboratory server. The other is the SICS
|
|
server. Both programs are started by means of a shell script called
|
|
<b>keepalive</b>. keepalive is basically an endless loop which calls
|
|
the program again and again and thus ensures that the program will
|
|
never stop running.
|
|
</p>
|
|
<p>
|
|
When the SICS server hangs, or you want to enforce an reinitialization of
|
|
everything the server process must be killed. This can be accomplished either manually or through a shell script.
|
|
</p>
|
|
<h2>Stopping SICS</h2>
|
|
<p>
|
|
All SICS processes can be stopped through the commands:
|
|
<pre>
|
|
monit stop all
|
|
monit quit
|
|
</pre>
|
|
given at the unix command line. You must be the instrument user
|
|
(for example DMC) on the instrument computer for this to work properly.
|
|
</p>
|
|
|
|
<h2>Restart Everything</h2>
|
|
<p>
|
|
If nothing seems to work any more, no connections can be obtained etc, then
|
|
the next guess is to restart everything. This is especially necessary if
|
|
mechanics or electronics people were closer to the instrument then 400 meters.
|
|
<OL>
|
|
<LI> Reboot the histogram memory. It has a tiny button labelled RST. That' s
|
|
the one. Can be operated with a hairpin, a ball point pen or the like.
|
|
<LI> Wait 5 minutes.
|
|
<LI> Restart the SICServer. Watch for any messages about things not being
|
|
connected or configured.
|
|
<LI> Restart and reconnect the client programs.
|
|
</OL>
|
|
If this fails (even after a second) time there may be a network problem which
|
|
can not be resolved by simple means.
|
|
</p>
|
|
<h2>Checking SICS Startup</h2>
|
|
<p>
|
|
Sometimes it happens that the SICServer hangs while starting up or hardware
|
|
components are not properly initialized. In such cases it is useful to
|
|
look at the SICS servers startup messages.
|
|
On the instrument account issue the commands:
|
|
<pre>
|
|
monit stop sicsserver
|
|
cd inst_sics
|
|
./SICServer inst.tcl | more
|
|
</pre>
|
|
Replace inst with the name of the appropriate instrument in lower case.
|
|
For example, from the home directory of the hrpt account on the computer hrpt:
|
|
<pre>
|
|
cd
|
|
monit stop sicsserver
|
|
cd hrpt_sics
|
|
./SICServer hrpt.tcl | more
|
|
</pre>
|
|
This allows to page through SICS startup messages and will help to
|
|
identify the troublesome component. The proceed to check the component and
|
|
the connections to it.
|
|
</p>
|
|
|
|
<h2> HELP debugging!!!!</h2>
|
|
<p>
|
|
The SICS server hanging or crashing should not happen. In order to sort such
|
|
problems out it is very helpful if any available debugging information is
|
|
saved and presented to the programmers. Information available are the log
|
|
files as written continously by the SICS server and posssible core files
|
|
lying around. They have just this name: core.pid, where pid is the process identification number.
|
|
In order to save them create a
|
|
new directory (for example dump2077) and copy the stuff in there. This looks
|
|
like:
|
|
<pre>
|
|
/home/DMC> mkdir dump2077
|
|
/home/DMC> cp log/*.log dump2077
|
|
/home/DMC> cp core.2077 dump2077
|
|
</pre>
|
|
The <tt>/home/DMC> </tt> is just the command prompt. Please note, that core
|
|
files are only available after crashes of the server. These few commands
|
|
will help to analyse the cause of the problem and to eventually resolve it.
|
|
</p>
|
|
</body>
|
|
</html>
|
|
|
|
|