Citect Alarms problem

Hi all this is a great site.
now im new to plcs and SCADA,

i got a Question for you guys out there that are the guns of citect now this may be one of thoes simple, haha look at this noob he cant fix that lol if so sorry.

i got 4 citect pc's 2 are servers and 2 are workstations ,
one is the dedicated server and one it the backup server, now the main server is keeping a alarm log on it but the alarm logs on the other 3 PC's have all stopped last dates are around mid year,
i got one PC working again by deleting all the log files and making a net Alarm txt , and it started working but the rest with no luck so far i have just mapped the main servers log file to them all to keep the bosses happy and something to look at.
how do i get them logging again?

yours truly
Woody

With your Primary and Standby servers do you ever turn both of them off. If both the primary and the standby keep their own alarm save file then they can get out of step.
If you only shut them down one at a time then depending on you're configuration whichever one is running will keep the corrupted file going.
If you can (depending on plant requirements) shutdown both servers then delete or move ALL the alarmsav.dat files you can find. The start up your servers then your clients. Your Clients don't always "talk" to the primary server. If for some reason they stop talking to their primary then they will swap over to their standby and remain. It is ONLY the Ioserver that will ALWAYS talk to the primary (provided the primary is OK)

Ok thanks will try this.
It looks like each PC keeps its own alarm log.
Each computer has a view log button with and input. Exec("c:\windows\system32\notepad.exe c:\citect\data\alarms.txt").
there is no actual alarm summary page setup just simply opens notpad.
is this a good practice??

also it is running citect v5.5 so bit behind the times.
and every area of the plant has its own project plus project for deviceIO Only.

If that is the case then I suspect that one of your Alarm servers is the one that is creating the Alarms.txt file and someone or something is copying this file out to all your other PC's. I would check the alarm servers and see which one is responsible for copying this file out to all others and then figure out why the copy is no longer working maybe the PC's share each other drives (or a folder) and this share is no longer valid ?

As far as the multple project goes that's not a bad way to go, it possibly lets them share parts of the projects and still have some parts (IO Device etc.) setup individually.

the primary and standby servers both run the same project on them and i found in the cicode this

FUNCTION CopyAlarms() // Called by SendTimePLCs in General.ci - 1am task
STRING FileName;
STRING DateString;
REAL TimeAdjusted;
TimeAdjusted =(TimeCurrent()-28800); !minus 8 hours get yesterdays date
DateString = (IntToStr(DateYear(TimeAdjusted,1)) + StrPad(IntToStr(DateMonth(TimeAdjusted)),"0",-2) + StrPad(IntToStr(DateDay(TimeAdjusted)),"0",-2));
FileName = ("C:\Reports\Alarms\" + DateString + ".TXT");
FileCopy("C:\Citect\Data\Alarms.001", FileName, 0); // Copy yerserday's alarm log
END

now dose citect write to the alarms.txt or only to the alarms.001
and the cicode is making the alarms.txt its just when an alarm happens it is in that txt file at the same time on the primary server

sorry for heaps of Questions
you have been great help

Citect creates it's Alarm files as (example) Alarms.txt (can also be DBF file depending on how the device is configure) . If it is configure to create history files (normal way to do it) then when it creates the next file it will rename all the history files moving them "up" one so that Alarms.300 becomes Alarms.301 and so eventually it renames Alarms.001 to Alarms.002 and then saves the current Alarms.txt as Alarms.001. So Alarms.001 is always the Previous Alarm file.
What that Cicode is doing is creating a filename names after yesterdays date (most likely this runs shortly after midnight and then copies the previous alarm file into a text file names after the day the alarms were generated. Typically this would be used as a history but it doesn't look like the code that would "push" these alarms out to all the other citect's. The original Alarms.txt will ONLY be created by the Alarm Server(s)
"Each computer has a view log button with and input. Exec("c:\windows\system32\notepad.exe c:\citect\data\alarms.txt").
there is no actual alarm summary page setup just simply opens notpad." Somewhere in Citect there should be some code that copies alarms.txt from either of the Alarm Servers to all the other citects, the code above copies BUT also changes their name so it wont be that one, try searching for "alarms.txt" later versions og citect had better search , not sure if v5.5 did.

got the 2 clients alarms working and the primary working,
the standby still no luck.
each computer is logging its own area alarms and the 2 servers are logging everything.
cant find any code to sent the alarms logs out to all the citects but there might be something there.
all the citects are linked via DH+ at the moment.

thanks Dua Anjing for helping out wish i had your brain haha
but thanks heaps.

Woody

If the Citect's are only connected via DH+ then they are all effectively "stand alone" projects. I thought/assumed they were connected via a LAN. If they are stand alone then each will be responsible for their own alarms. Have a look in the Citect Explorer under the Alarms menu at the Alarm Categories section check if their is an entry in Summary Device or Log Device. If there is then go thru your Devices section which is under the system menu. This should describe what sort of logging device you are actually using. If there are no entries in the Log or Summary Device then check your IOdevices project then check the Citect Include project. There should be an entry in one of these. Go thru Citect's online help and read up on Devices hopefully there will be somehints there as to what has gone wrong.

yeah i thinking today i dint say it was on DH+ thats why i said it at the end of my last post sorry.
will check out Citect's online help thanks for the tips

ok iv found the log device its sitting in the IOdevice project witch is not on the include projects for the project that is running but it has the alarm cat in it.
but i see that some of the included project have the IOdevice included.
i need to do up a tree of included projects by the looks of things cause i didn't look at the IOdevice cause it was not on the running project includes.
thanks for the push in the right direction and iv learned a lot