Now at this point we assume you have gone ahead and installed the PI
Server. You started up the PI Server, and you have done something
like, like run the Service's
applet and verified that the Services are running, or as
I demonstrated earlier, from the Command prompt, you can just do a
netstart and take a look at all the different
Services and see if PI is among them.
So, you know, we assume you have done that. But, the real proof
as to whether PI's working or not is to go ahead and try to connect
to a PI Server. How do you connect to a PI Server? Well,
we have a, a Connection Dialog Box. This
Connection Manager
Utility that you will see in just about every application
that makes use, or that connects to a PI Server.
And, of course, one of the applications that connects to a PI Server
is this PI System Management Tools. Now,
let me introduce you to this System Management Tools, or PI
SMT for short. We are going to be talking about this an awful lot.
This is a System Manager's class, so, you know, get friendly with
this. We are going to use this in just about everything
we do with System Management. As you can see here, there's a,
there's a list of, of PI
Servers that you can connect to. This
list actually is populated at this point because
during the installation of our SDK, our
Software Development Kit, you know, which is, which is what
this, what layer of software these Tools
are built on, during the installation of that SDK
you were prompted to enter the name of a PI Server.
And, if the PI Server did not exist, if you just
made one up, that's fine. It, it, you, it, we will accept
a made up PI Server at that point. It's just that, of
course, at this point when you try to actually connect, you are not going to
be able to connect. So, let me show you what I mean by
connecting. I am going to go into File,
and go into Connections, and this is
the, this is the Connection Manager Dialog Box.
It's within the PI System Management
Tools, and many other Tools within,
you know, that, that we use within OSI -- the Client Tools,
etc. So, this is how we would initiate a connection.
You go ahead and click on the check-box. That both
indicates to you that the, that's the server
that we are currently selected. And it also initiates a
connection at that point. It's a connection to this PI Server,
and we will talk about some of these configuration items in just a second.
So, as I said, there's going to be a
server. It may or may not be the correct server, so, if you need
to add, at this point, the correct server, what you would do
is do a right mouse click and then choose Add
Server. And this is where you can go ahead
and type the name of a, as you saw with
that little balloon help here, a fully qualified network
name, or it could be just a local,
the local node name, or it could be the IP Address
of the computer that you are trying to
connect to. Now, I will give you an example. I have got a
computer here. I am just going to call it --
let's call it myotherpi.
Yeah, there, there's actually another PI Server
in my network here. This is on a different device.
I can go ahead and connect to that by just typing the name
of the, the network node. I can specify
the user. I think I am going to specify
pidemo. These are two of the default users that we install
with PI. pidemo does not require
a password, so I will, I will choose to use him. And then I am going to specify
the Connection Type is going to be PI3. There's only two choices there.
This is the old, old system
that runs under VMS. Very few customers still have
that, so typically you are going to be using PI3.
And the Port Numbers for PI3 is 5450 unless
somebody's decided to change things drastically. It is
changeable, but typically we see people leave that alone.
So, with those inputs, with the
name of the user, the name
of the -- and the password if it's required, and, by the way,
this User Name can be something you type
if you have some users defined in PI.
But, that's, these are the credentials
that we are going to use for connecting.
And, when I go ahead and say OK, at this
point it adds it. It also checked
as I added it that that, that actually exists. It did not
actually initiate the connection. It will not
initiate the connection until I click on this check-box.
And, as you can see, we have connected to that. That actually ends up
being a slightly older server. As you can see I am on
the latest version right here. This is an older version,
the PI Server that we, of course,
can continue to connect to. And I will go ahead and disconnect from that.
I will go ahead and close the PI Connection Manager.
Now, what happens if you do not have
the PI System Management Tools on the computer that you
would like to test this connection from? Well, if you
do have any PI Software at all, you probably
have this Directory: Program Files, PIPC,
PISDK. Just about all of our
client applications will install this Directory, and
within this Directory, you will find this little utility
called AboutPI-SDK. When you run
this utility, it, one of the options it
has is that Connection Manager. So, if you do not
have that System Management Tools, you can access the same
Dialog Box by, again, going into this
AboutPI-SDK and just clicking on
Connections. Now,
one other thing you can do within this Connection Manager,
PI Connection Manager, is you can specify which of the PI
Servers out there is your Default PI Server.
I would do that within Tools. Within Options,
you simply choose what your Default Server is. As you can
see, this is a list of the configured servers.
And, just a minor point here. The
repository for all the information that you are putting in here, you know, the
Configuration of the Default Server and the List of Servers,
that's all kept in something called the Known Servers Table.
Sometimes you will hear us refer to that as the KST in our
writings. So that's what we are talking about -- the Known Servers Table,
simply a place within Windows where we store
all this information. Well, that's everything I wanted to tell you
about this PI Connection Manager. Now, one minor point,
just a bit of trivia, really. This Port Number, people are
sometimes curious where'd we come up with 545, 5450?
Actually, 545 was the street address
of our old building. 545 Estudillo Avenue in
San Leandro, California. When we went to the NT and Unix Platform,
we increased that to 5450. So
a little bit of trivia about the history of the company.