Tango Box description

The virtual computer

The virtual computer defined for the Tango virtual box has

• 512 MBytes of memory

• 25 GBytes of disk

The operating system is Ubuntu 9.10. It is configured to have 2 user names which are

1. tango/tango_test
2. guest/guest_test

These two users have the necessary privileges to administrate the virtual computer. The first one is the interesting one. The second one has been defined in case it could be necessary but is not used yet. The computer name is set to tangobox.

This virtual box is foreseen to run in the VMware virtual computing software named VMware Player which is available at no cost in this download page.

The virtual box network configuration is NAT. Port forwarding is not included in the VMware player free release. This virtual computer is able to communicate to the external world but the external world is not able to initiate a communication to it.

The installed software

On this box, the following software is installed:

• gcc 4.4
  
• OmniORB 4.1.4
• MySQL 5.1.37
• Python 2.6.4
• Java 6 and 5 (for the Bensikin application)
• Apache 2.2
  
• Php 5.2
  
• Boost Python 1.41
• Boost thread 1.38
• Qt 4.5 with its designer
• Netbeans 6.7

The Tango software

The Tango related software installed on this virtual computer is:

• Tango distribution 7.1.1 including ATK 4.0.6
• OmniNotify 2.1 (notifd)
  
• PyTango 7.1
  
• The archiving system (HDB, TDB and Snap) with the related GUIs (Mambo, Bensikin and E-Giga(1.6.6))
• Jddd
  
• QTango 3.0
• The Alarm system 1.1 (from Elettra)

The Tango configuration

Device servers 

On top of the Starter device server, the box is configured to run 12 device server processes:

• 2 test device servers

• The TangoTest device server (C++) with one device
• The motor simulator device server (Python) with 3 simulated motors

• 2 Device servers dedicated to the Alarm system
• The alarm device server itself (named Alarm)
• A simple device server allowing Alarm system testing (named AlarmTest)
  
• 8 Device servers dedicated to the archiving system
• 3 Device servers for data storage
• 3 Device servers for data retrieval
• 2 Device servers for archiving management

The alarm system

The alarm system is configured with 3 alarms:

1. Alarm if the double_scalar attribute of the sys/tg_test/1 device (instance of the TangoTest class) is above 200
2. Alarm if the double_scalar attribute of the sys/tg_test/1 device (instance of the TangoTest class) is above 200 and if the motor sys/motor/1 (instance of the SimuMotor class) is moving
3. Alarm if the Alarm_test attribute of the sys/alarm/test device is true. This is dedicated to the Alarm system test feature

The archiving system

The profile tango_vbox has been created for the History DataBase (HDB) of the archiving system. An archiving configuration (AC) named vbox has been defined. The attributes double_scalar, float_scalar and long_scalar are stored in the database every minute.

The same profile ( tango_vbox )  has been used for the Temporary DataBase (TDB) of the archiving system. An archiving configuration (AC) named vbox_tdb has been defined. The attributes double_scalar and long_scalar are stored in the temporary database every second. Note that due to a polling period of the double_scalar attribute set to 3 seconds, the effective storage period in the database is also 3 seconds (Not necessary to store several times the same data)

Two visual configurations (VC) have also been created with the same names. There is a one to one link between these visual configurations and the archiving configurations.

For the Snapshotting system, the same profile name ( tango_vbox ) has been defined. Two contexts have been created:

1. The first one is named FirstContext and contains simply 2 attributes (sys/tg_test/1/double_scalar and sys/motor/1/position)
2. The second one is named SecondContext and contains only one attribute (sys/tg_test/1/double_scalar)

The Tango user configuration

The tango user is the owner of all the tango related processes. A set of Desktop icons allows the user to start a large set of the Tango tools (Jive, LogViewer, Pogo, Astor, ATKpanel, jddd, jdraw, devicetree, mambo, bensikin, Atkmoni and the Alarm GUI)

On the Desktop, you will also find some documentations as pdf files (The Tango book, the Mambo and Bensikin applications doc and the Alarm device server doc).

There are also 2 desktops icons to start:

1. NetBeans to try developing Java and ATK based application
2. Qt Designer to try developing QTango based application

Firefox is configured with its home page being our pink site. There are 4 pre-defined bookmarks:

1. The pink site home page
   
2. The PyTango doc on the pink site
3. E-Giga application
4. The QTango documentation

In the Tango user home directory (/home/tango), there is a README file which describes (very briefly) the directory tree structure. In the qtango directory, there is a UI file that you can open in the Qt designer to see some of the QTango widgets in action.