Schedule Plus re-establishing comm's

Hi All,

I just wanted to know what the bottom line is on Schedule Plus when re-establishing temporarily broken comm's.

In particular, we have Schedule Plus residing in one building but talking via a CNI over the clients LAN to the C-Bus networks in another building. This usually works fine except if there is a problem with the clients LAN (which does happen occassionally). If this happens it seems that Schedule Plus has trouble connecting back up to all of the Networks (12 Networks in building). The first we know of this is when the client says that his outside lighting has not come on etc. But for the client looking at the Schedule Plus screen it all looks fine. Usually the client then re-starts his PC and Schedule Plus and it then synchs up and everything is fine, except he is not always aware when there is a LAN issue.

I have also noticed, that sometimes when our clients re-start Schedule Plus (after a power cut etc) that it does not always like this and does not connect up correctly to the networks - often hangs up on trying to synch up a network.

On the shortcut on the clients desktop we add the switches to start Schedule Plus up in user mode and to connect to the C-Bus network(s). But for most of the clients I show them how to check the Network States and try re-starting Schedule Plus again if they do not all synch up after 30 minutes.

I have been careful lately to have no more than 3 C-Bus clocks enabled per network and have made sure that when I go to site I double check this. I read somewhere that too many clocks can cause synching issues.

I really like Schedule Plus and the flexibilty it allows - you can pretty much program anything but lately have had some doubts about its robustness and ability to recover from comm's issues.

If anyone has any little gems they would like to share it would be much appreciated.

 

It would be good if you could get a C-Gate log (event level 9) and a Schedule Plus log during this happening so that we can find out what is happening. Schedule Plus should re-connect to all networks properly.

You can use a component with the "C-Bus Network State" in-built system IO variable to show the state of a single network. You would need 12 components to show the state of all of your networks, but you would be able to see at a glance if it was all OK.

You shouldn't need to re-boot to get this sorted out. Does closing then re-opening the C-Gate connection fix it?

We would need to see the logs to know what is happening here.

 

Thank you for your reply.

Unfortunately, on this site we do not have remote access - the IT dept does not allow any remote access into their network, so setting up logs etc. has to be done through the maintenance staff (with mixed results). Next time I personally get to site, I will look at setting these up.

 

Hi all,

I am having the same problem with schedule +.

When sch+ is first started up it syncs the networks fine.

If a network drops off for whatever reason schedule plus will not re-establish this network, it begins to sync but when it gets to the last unit it will start syncing again.

The only way to fix it is to close down and restart sch+.

Any help would be good.

Cheers
Mike

 

Once again, without logs, there isn't much that can be done to understand and fix the problem.

 

Hi All,

Since my last post I haven't had any issues on site, that I have been aware of, so have not got any log files.

However, I did set up a little test back at work. Just a test project in Schedule Plus connected through a PCI to a 12 channel relay.

I then turned on and off the 230V power to the relay (with C-Bus power supply) to simulate a power cut. Often we have Schedule Plus on a PC or server that is UPS supplied - so the C-Bus networks lose power but Sched+ keeps running. So I left Sched+ running on my laptop.

Doing this on my little test bench, I found that sometimes Sched+ would not synch with the test network. The wiring, traffic, power supply etc. should not be an issue, as this is as simple as it gets.

This was probably 1 failure to re-synch in 5 or 6 simulated network power cuts. I gave it some time between these simulated power cuts to settle down.

Just thought I would share my findings and hopefully stimulate some feedback.

 

Thanks Ian. We will look into it.

 

How is progress going on this issue?

Have just had another network outage and Sched+ didn't re-sync.

Mike.

 

I have tried this a few times and can't get it to fail (it takes a while, but Schedule Plus does re-connect). Can you tell me the C-Gate and Schedule Plus versions you are using?

Log files as described above would be useful too.