Setting up Phoebus and Your VNC

This page describes how to set up your own instance of Phoebus, and how to view this in a VNC.

What is Phoebus, and why do we use it?

Phoebus is an interactive slow controls control and display application. As a DAQ expert, it allows you to access certain controls for different detector subsystems, such as the TPC and NTBs. With Phoebus, we can reset servers and also power cycle components remotely without needing to be in the building. Usually, power cycling is a last resort, but it is recommended to set up your Phoebus instance and VNC in case you need to, whilst on shift. To set up Phoebus, you need to do two things:

1

Set up and log into a DAQ VNC

Before you can even start your instance of Phoebus, you need to set up and open a DAQ VNC.

2

Run your instance of Phoebus

Once you're in the VNC, you can then run your instance of Phoebus.

Setting up your VNC

Although I use a Mac, I prefer to use TigerVNC, which you can download here.

Making a command-line shell script and an alias

In my setup, I chose to write a shell script that will open my special DAQ VNC within TigerVNC directly. An example script is shown below:

daq_vnc.sh

#!/bin/bash

# Start the SSH tunnel (if not already running)
ssh -f -N -J <your-username>@sbnd-gateway04.fnal.gov <your-username>@sbnd-daq02.fnal.gov -L 5919:localhost:5919

# Wait a second for the tunnel to become active
sleep 2

# Launch TigerVNC Viewer to localhost:19 (because 5900 + 19 = 5919)
# Format: <host>:<display#>
# Here, you need to give your local path to TigerVNC
/Applications/TigerVNC\ Viewer\ 1.14.1.app/Contents/MacOS/TigerVNC\ Viewer localhost:19

Once I'd made this script, I added an alias by going to my .zshrc profile, and adding

alias daq-vnc='~/daq_vnc.sh'

Remember to re-source your environment once you've made changes to this! For example, I run

source ~/.zshrc

Keep this running in the background at all times when using the VNC!

Setting up Phoebus in your VNC

Now, you should've successfully created and opened your DAQ VNC! Once you've done this, there are a couple more necessary steps required to open your Phoebus instance.

Changing onto a DAQ machine

Once you're in the VNC, you want to make sure you're running from a DAQ area. To do this, find the Terminal application (the VNC is a Linux machine if this helps) and shell into a DAQ machine as shown below:

ssh sbnd-daq02

Opening and editing your bash profile

The next thing you'll want to do is edit and open your bash profile. Still in the Terminal, type the command below (change from vim depending on which text editor you like to use!):

vim ~/.bash_profile

In your bash profile, you'll need to add the following:

~/.bash_profile

PHOEBUS_DIR=/home/nfs/sbnddcs/alma9/phoebus/phoebus/phoebus-product
PHOEBUS_PORT=9860 # Change this to a different number greater than 4096
alias phoebus="source ~sbnddcs/alma9/setup_dcs.sh; ${PHOEBUS_DIR}/phoebus.sh -server ${PHOEBUS_PORT} -settings /home/nfs/sbnddcs/alma9/sbndcs/sbnd/scripts/phoebus/SBND.conf"

This will source Phoebus, and includes an alias for setting it up, which you can use in the Terminal simply as phoebus.

Important: You need to pick a number greater than 4096 for your Phoebus port, and don't use one that's already in use, I don't think!

The Redmine notes for how to source your own Phoebus instance can be found here.

Setting Phoebus off to run

Once you've opened and edited your bash profile, simply type

phoebus

into the Terminal and voila, Phoebus will load! It will automatically open a program called CS-Studio, so don't be alarmed when this happens.

Once you've opened an instance of Phoebus on the VNC, you shouldn't need to do this again (the VNC saves it for next time when you close/open it).

Opening the panels that we want in Phoebus

Once Phoebus has loaded, we need to open the control panels for the different detector subsystems. If you've never done this before, here are some quick instructions:

1

Click "File" in the top left

2

Select "Open"

3

Click the magnifying glass in the top right

4

Search for "A_Summary.bob" and select this

When you have completed all of the above steps, you should see a screen like this:

This is where you access the detector controls! More on how to do this can be found in the next section.

The full path to where this summary page is is dumped below.

/home/nfs/sbnd/sbndcs/sbnd/css/A_Summary.bob