Tracer Summit version 12 problems

[chillrdude]

I have a customer with an old Summit BMTW running version 12, the system has worked pretty well until recently. One of the problems he is having has to do with the event log. He has his home computer and his laptop set up as event receivers for system log,system alarms and critical alarms.

This has worked fine for years but recently these items only show up in his event log if he leaves his computer on and connected all night, if he logs out at say 4pm then logs back in at 8am the next day he may get events from 6am on, but nothing that happened thoughout the night. If he stays logged in and connected he gets all the events that happened thru the night no problem.

I have checked the memory in the BCU and the Non Volatile memory says 45% available and the Volatile memory is 55% available. Where is the NVM and VM ? This BCU has the standard memory card in it, could this be the problem?

I think it is a hardware problem, this BCU is like 10 years old, do you think upgrading to version 17 would solve his problem, any other ideas?

For what its worth the BCU is set up to forward alarms to his Blackberry, that function works OK with no problems, the BCU seems like it wont store events and send them to the proper receiver unless the receiver is connected.

[badconfig]

The memory cards can develop problems depending on what is running in the BCU. I have had to replace them in the past. It is a known problem.

Not sure if it is your problem, but could be a starting point.

[StillKicking]

I have a customer with an old Summit BMTW running version 12, the system has worked pretty well until recently. One of the problems he is having has to do with the event log. He has his home computer and his laptop set up as event receivers for system log,system alarms and critical alarms.

This has worked fine for years but recently these items only show up in his event log if he leaves his computer on and connected all night, if he logs out at say 4pm then logs back in at 8am the next day he may get events from 6am on, but nothing that happened thoughout the night. If he stays logged in and connected he gets all the events that happened thru the night no problem.

I have checked the memory in the BCU and the Non Volatile memory says 45% available and the Volatile memory is 55% available. Where is the NVM and VM ? This BCU has the standard memory card in it, could this be the problem?

I think it is a hardware problem, this BCU is like 10 years old, do you think upgrading to version 17 would solve his problem, any other ideas?

For what its worth the BCU is set up to forward alarms to his Blackberry, that function works OK with no problems, the BCU seems like it wont store events and send them to the proper receiver unless the receiver is connected.

Have you cleared the alarm log? Done any types of resets? You could pitch a high cap memory card, or better yet sell an "upgraded " BCU. I would try to test the BCU with new receivers first...
10 years is a long time for a 'computer'.

[a/c warrior]

Try upgrading to a new hicap memory card, Upgrade to current TS version.

[wojami]

Another thing you might look at is making sure there arent alot of old exceptions. They eat up memory and can be deleted easily.

[Webbyz]

Well upgrading from v12 firmware would be a good solution regardless. I would at least go to v16 with 16.092 firmware. There has been a ton of fixes and improvements in the firmware images.

I don't know if v17 would help. I don't think that exceptions/schedules are going to ne an issue becuase it seems like you have quite a bit of free memory.

How about the processor idle time?

Also you need to remember that the BCU can only hold so many events in its memory. This falls along the same line as the BCU Event Log. It will only retain the last 100 events. So I think that if you have lets say "System Log" events going to the BCU Event Log and that gathers more than 100 items over night, the BCU might end up purging out messages that should have went to the home PC.

So you might want to limit the amount of things going to the BCU event log to System Alarm and System Critical alarming and also the Idle Time would be good to know.

[chillrdude]

Thanks for the replies guys, so far I have already reset the BCU several times, cleared the code and the database several times also. The idle time says 65.99, NVM available 40% , VM available now says 57.3.

I called it up from the house the other night and while I am connected it will dump alarms and events to my event log just like it is supposed to, but if a workstation is not connected it will not store the alarms and dump the history to the workstation when you connect to it.

Not sure which way to go from here, might try an upgrade on the software which he would have to do if I replace the BCU with something newer anyway, any other ideas?