The ArchestrAnaut

Does this sound familiar?  You’re working on an issue or a project and you have a brilliant idea for a tool to either save you lots of time or make a system run better.  So you start working on it for a few nights, make some good progress, then you get busy, lose focus……you know the end of the story.  But wow that really was a great idea and you really wish you could finish it. 

At this point I’ve given up on even starting these projects because I know I’ll never finish them.  Well, my efforts are pretty much wasted if I have started something then dropped it before it’s done and usable. 

So here is my idea.  I know we have some really brilliant people in the Archestranaut community.  Also, because we’re all so good at what we do and very much in demand we don’t have enough time as individuals… but what if we pooled our efforts on a single project to come up with something great… nothing new here it’s called Open Sourcing.  And that’s what I want to do with all of these cool projects we’ve all been working on .

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In our work we do a lot of interfacing with SQL databases (usually MS SQL Server).  Being able to interface with SQL from IAS is a big weapon in one’s arsenal.  You can retrieve data from a table or view, execute stored procedures and functions, and virtually anything else you can dream of doing with T-SQL.

We’ve wrapped most of the code to do the SQL DB interfacing into a DLL for simplicity and error trapping.  However, this post is intended to give a basic example on executing a simple query from an IAS script using the .NET objects.

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If you read our first post in the series( http://archestranaut.wordpress.com/2011/02/01/regular-expressions-for-fun-and-profit-part-1-of-2/) you are no doubt excited about the world of possibilities you open up when you combine Archestra with Regular Expressions.   In this post we’ll look at a real world example that we use with our clients to solve real world issues.

Keeping time in System Platform is absolutely critical.  When I work with a client that is having connectivity and deployment issues this is one of the first areas I look at.  We’ve found that using standard NTP works just fine (except on your Historian) as far as an accuracy level but what if something happens and you start drifting?  How do you know you are drifting.  I guess you could do some fancy math in the historian while historizing timestamps on platforms but that gets messy.  Let’s put our new found skills to work.

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You may have heard of regular expressions in your programming careers.  Another term you may have come across is Regex.  Either way, what the heck is it?  Put simply a regular expression is a pattern matching technique that allows you to specify a match pattern and compare that to a string.  The result will be some kind of indication that you found a match.  You can get even fancier and get the system to return to you a list of matches.

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I’ve been working on something today to log custom warning or error messages to the SMC from an IAS script.  I did a little sniffing around with Red Gate’s .Net Reflector and found an existing DLL with the ArchestrA.Diagnostics namespace in it.  It has a class with some static calls to log messages to the SMC.

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Most of our IAS systems have a lot of vendor provided pieces of equipment (aka skids).  Those skids usually have their own PLC and HMI.  The HMI’s usually have some function to login and they apply security based on the users group or security level.  Most of them have common or shared accounts that everybody knows the password for (even the disgruntled guy you just fired).

The other way that shows up a lot is having individual user account & privileges being role based.  If you have 15 users and 30 skids, that becomes a management nightmare trying to disable users, remember passwords, etc.  You could draw the same corollary to a bunch of Windows PCs’.  Security would be much easier to manage from a single location.  Our IAS system are always built on top of a Windows ActiveDirectory (AD) Domain.  This at least simplifies all of the SCADA security to be managed in one place:  the domain controller (DC).  Wouldn’t it be nice to use that to manage the skids too?

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IAS is as flexible as or more flexible than any other platform out on the market in terms of the breadth of programming possibilities. The concept of inheritance makes it possible to make changes at a template level and all of its children (templates & instances) will be changed too. Equally as powerful is IAS’s inclusion of .NET in their QuickScript language.

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