.\" Process this man page with .\" groff -man -Tascii mxserver.8 .\" .TH MXSERVER 8 "January 2008" "MX Administrator Manuals" .SH NAME mxserver \- server for the MX data acquisition and control system .SH SYNOPSIS .B mxserver [ .I options .B ] .SH DESCRIPTION .B mxserver is the primary server for the MX data acquisition and control system. It is the responsibility of the MX server to manage data acquisition hardware on behalf of client application programs. The MX server is normally not started directly, but instead is implicitly started by running the init script .B mx(8) with a command line like /opt/mx/sbin/mx start if MXDIR is set to /opt/mx. If you start the MX server using the $MXDIR/sbin/mx script described above, you can specify additional command line arguments for the MX server in the file $MXDIR/etc/mxserver.opt. This is most frequently used to enable the -t option. .SH OPTIONS .IP "-A" enables network protocol debugging. If this option is selected, each message passing between the server and the client(s) will result in a message being sent to stderr that describes the content of the message. .IP "-b fmt" specifies the format to use for client communication. Currently, the possible values for .I fmt are 'raw', 'xdr', 'ascii'. Normally this argument is only used for testing the server, since it is generally better to let the client and server autonegotiate the best format at connection time. .IP "-C acl_filename" specifies the name of the client connection ACL file. .IP "-c" enables asynchronous callback support. .IP "-d debug_level" specifies the debugging level to run the server at. The default value is 0. .IP -D requests that .B mxserver automatically start a program debugger such as that from Visual Studio or gdb at program startup time. .IP "-e filename" redirects the output of stderr to the specified file name. In this case, the buffering of stderr is not changed. .IP "-E filename" is the same as the previous option, except stderr is configured to be unbuffered. .IP "-f database_filename" specifies the name of the MX database file that describes the devices to be controlled by this MX server. You should almost always specify this option flag. .IP "-k" disables asynchronous callback support. .IP "-l log_number" specifies which of the logs to use from the available values of LOG_LOCAL0 to LOG_LOCAL7. Note that you specify the numerical value alone without LOG_LOCAL in front of it. .IP "-L log_number" does the same thing as the .I -l option, except that messages are also logged to stderr in this case. .IP "-n microseconds" requests that the MX server sleep at the start of each pass through the event loop for the requested number of microseconds. The default behavior is to not perform any sleep in the event loop. You should only use this option as a stopgap if you have reason to believe that the MX server is sending commands to a data acquisition device too frequently, which should almost never happen. .IP "-p port_number" specifies the TCP port number that the server will wait for clients on. .IP "-P default_display_precision" specifys the default for how many digits after the decimal point are to be displayed by clients. .IP -s requests that the MX server display a stack traceback when sent a SIGINT signal. The default is not to display a stack traceback. .IP -S requests that the MX server .B not display a stack traceback when sent a SIGINT signal. In the current version of the MX server, this is essentially redundant. .IP -t requests that the server display a message when the open() routine for a given record is invoked. The resulting messages look like .nf Jul 12 14:39:20 Opening record 'keithley4'. .fi This feature is to help in determining why an MX server is hanging during server startup. Generally the record whose 'Opening record' message is displayed last in the server log is the record that is causing the problem. .IP "-u filename" specifies the name of a Unix domain socket that the server will wait for clients on. Please note that the '-t' and '-u' options are .B not mutually exclusive. It is possible for a given server to monitor both a TCP socket and a Unix domain socket for client connections. .IP -Z requests the MX server to not install its normal signal handlers. This option is intended for debugging purposes. It can be useful if the standard crash handlers are making it hard to determine the reason for the original crash. .SH FILES The following are conventional locations for these file. The conventional value for MXDIR is /opt/mx. .IP $MXDIR/etc/mxserver.dat - record database for the MX server. .IP $MXDIR/etc/mxserver.acl - client connection ACL file. .SH SEE_ALSO .B mxserver.dat(5), mxserver.acl(5), mx(8) .SH AUTHOR William Lavender