J
Jiri Baum
The easiest way is not to do it at all. You can telnet or ssh into the server machine from the client machine and start the program there. No
networking required - it's all hidden by the OS.
If you do need the networking, you can have nc (netcat) send the data. Depending on what you mean by ``pack up''...
plc_reading_program | nc host port
nc -l -p port | display_thingy
It sounds like something for Hugh Jack's LPC - he's got stuff for network access via telnet/java and e-mail.
(Yes, we really should merge the two projects...)
> None of my controls are PC based. Any critical data is stored in the PLC
> because I know that Wonder-Where? may crap out at any second.
It's amazing what MS managed to do to expectation of reliability of computers. Used to be that an office full of people, rows and rows of desks, could all use the one central computer all day and it'd work.
> Winsock may not be the greatest implementation in the world, but drag,
> drop, punch in some port and IP info, and it is sending my data off into
> the great beyond. At my client end, set my port and IP, connect, and
> viola! Here comes my data.
nc can do that for you - if you still need to do that.
> I am willing to sweat out coding elegance and good design work for a
> machine control. But for a utility that I am going to use for a week or
> two and toss, what can I use in Linux that offers that ease of setup?
The obvious answer is Perl, otherwise known as Unix's ``Swiss Army Chainsaw'', but I'm not sure I should recommend it - as the name suggests,
it is handy and versatile but very very dangerous. It's also not particularly intuitive unless you're already familiar with Unix.
For the problem you mentioned above, like I wrote, just telnet in and run the program on the server.
The VB-equivalent language would probably be python. Being more modern than BASIC, it includes modern concepts like procedures - but I haven't done all that much with it, so I can't speak from experience.
> Let's face it: Not everyone knows C.
OK, we'll have to be careful to keep that in mind as we write the MAT LinuxPLC - for obvious reasons, all of us do know C...
...
> I haven't booted to Linux for months now. Mainly because I cannot get
> anything to run that doesn't install with the distro.
Hmm, I myself don't have that many things that didn't come with the distro; Debian's pretty comprehensive.
> Bottom line is Linux is not a system for someone who doesn't want to
> spend their life doing it.
OTOH, Microsoft is not a system for someone who doesn't want to spend their life doing everything the Microsoft way.
Jiri
--
Jiri Baum <[email protected]>
http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jiribvisit the MAT LinuxPLC project at http://mat.sf.net
networking required - it's all hidden by the OS.
If you do need the networking, you can have nc (netcat) send the data. Depending on what you mean by ``pack up''...
plc_reading_program | nc host port
nc -l -p port | display_thingy
It sounds like something for Hugh Jack's LPC - he's got stuff for network access via telnet/java and e-mail.
(Yes, we really should merge the two projects...)
> None of my controls are PC based. Any critical data is stored in the PLC
> because I know that Wonder-Where? may crap out at any second.
It's amazing what MS managed to do to expectation of reliability of computers. Used to be that an office full of people, rows and rows of desks, could all use the one central computer all day and it'd work.
> Winsock may not be the greatest implementation in the world, but drag,
> drop, punch in some port and IP info, and it is sending my data off into
> the great beyond. At my client end, set my port and IP, connect, and
> viola! Here comes my data.
nc can do that for you - if you still need to do that.
> I am willing to sweat out coding elegance and good design work for a
> machine control. But for a utility that I am going to use for a week or
> two and toss, what can I use in Linux that offers that ease of setup?
The obvious answer is Perl, otherwise known as Unix's ``Swiss Army Chainsaw'', but I'm not sure I should recommend it - as the name suggests,
it is handy and versatile but very very dangerous. It's also not particularly intuitive unless you're already familiar with Unix.
For the problem you mentioned above, like I wrote, just telnet in and run the program on the server.
The VB-equivalent language would probably be python. Being more modern than BASIC, it includes modern concepts like procedures - but I haven't done all that much with it, so I can't speak from experience.
> Let's face it: Not everyone knows C.
OK, we'll have to be careful to keep that in mind as we write the MAT LinuxPLC - for obvious reasons, all of us do know C...
...
> I haven't booted to Linux for months now. Mainly because I cannot get
> anything to run that doesn't install with the distro.
Hmm, I myself don't have that many things that didn't come with the distro; Debian's pretty comprehensive.
> Bottom line is Linux is not a system for someone who doesn't want to
> spend their life doing it.
OTOH, Microsoft is not a system for someone who doesn't want to spend their life doing everything the Microsoft way.
Jiri
--
Jiri Baum <[email protected]>
http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jiribvisit the MAT LinuxPLC project at http://mat.sf.net