Smartserver and nci's

[klrogers]

Working on my first project with a Echelon smartserver, and well I'm not feeling very smart at the moment. I can not get nciSetpoints to write to the controllers, for those who are familiar with the smartserver, I created the points on the smartserver tree by copying from the LNS tree, all the nvi's & nvo's work fine but nciSetpoints never writes to the controller, the only way I ever got it to work was binding back from the smartserver tree to the LNS tree, but of course that only works while you have the enteprise service running. Since this site is not going to have a PC on site that will not work.

Any one had any experience on the smartserver? any problems with nci's? any tips to help me out? Or should I just use a ilone3 !!

Thanks

Kevin

[dapper]

kl, I have used ncis with no problem. This is not 'standalone' mode, correct? Check all the settings in 'driver' and 'general'. Make sure the format matches in each case, LNS and Smart Server. If they are different it wont work. You have to change these settings first in the LNS tree before you copy to the Smart Server tree, you can not change in the Smart Server tree if not done first in LNS.

[klrogers]

Dapper

Thanks for the advice, at least I know they can work, I was beginning to think that you could not use nci's with the smartserver, you may be right about the format I need to look into that. It also seemed to me that if one unit went off-line that all polling stopped, have you noticed anything like that?

Kevin

[dapper]

I don't think I have ever noticed that situation.

[klrogers]

Well I have found out from a member of the smartserver forum that nci's will not work unless either you are connected to a LNS proxy server or you set the ilon to standalone mode.
The suggestion was to configure the devices in LNS, then switch to standalone mode. And switch back to LNS if needed to adjust configuration, tried that on my test bench, worked fine switching to standalone, ncisetpoints worked great in standalone mode, switched back to LNS, found that not all devices chaged their domain back to the original, so then had to go in and change domains back.
I think Echelon needs to give us the option to allow nci's to write to thre device even if they are not updating the LNS database (the ilone3 wrote them to the device) its not a big problem if you are only using nciSetpoints in this way.

Kevin

[lontshooter]

KL

Echelon just release a service pack update SP4A that has some of the fixes in it for the smartserver, I have downloaded the patch but have not installed it to verify that it works.
In addition before you install the SP4A you need to install the SP4 for the smartserver.

Lontshooter

[klrogers]

Already done that, the smartserver software is not designed to allow changing nci's in a controller without connecting to a LNS database or being in standalone mode. When I tried the switch to/from standalone I already had installed service pack 4A

Kevin