When it's time to troubleshoot a problem with
a connecting client, such as an interface, the best place to do this
as a start anyway, is to go into Operation, Network
Managers Statistics, and you can take a look at all the different things that are
currently connected to this PI Server.
And so, for example, if I double-click on this, is to,
shows me that ICU, the Interface
Configuration Utility, is currently connected from
my, MyDifferent Node. If I go into Connection here, I can
see the node. That's the IP Address. It's actually
connected from over here. This is MyInterface Node.
This Node, as you can see, I am running
ICU. So, that's
fairly helpful. It shows me all kinds of information about this.
And, especially, it can be useful for troubleshooting
interfaces. So, for example, here's the
OPC Interface, and as you can see, the OPC
Interface is connected from that same computer.
If I look at Connection, I can see that right here.
And it shows me some other things that are very, very useful. It tells
me that the way that this connected was
with a Trust connection. As you can see,
the, the Trust connection is the one that's highlighted here,
and it tells me that it's associated this Interface with that
identify in PI. And, there's some other
things that you will see here as well. You know, the number of bytes
we have sent and received, specifics about the host
name, etc. Anyway,
the point of showing you this is because this is a great way to
figure out, you know, if you know how the connections are supposed to work,
it's a great way to figure out what's connected and what's not.
Now, there is one problem that you may have noticed already.
Notice I have got two copies of the Interface that are currently
connected. One from
back on the 9th, and if I go down here I will see
the next one. Yeah, see, this is the next one for that
OPC Interface.
This one was from the 10th.
At two, two copies of that but
you may have noticed back here on ICU,
actually the Interface is not even running right now. So, if I
were to go ahead and start up a third cop.. -- start this up, I will
probably get a third copy. We call those dead
connections. Sometimes these dead connections will kind of sit around
in this Network Statistics. It's not a big deal, it's just something
to be aware of. Now, watch what happens when I go ahead
and switch over to my Interface Node. I am going to start up the Interface.
That should start up yet another one of these connections
and also, because the Interface is dependent on
bufserve it's going to start of bufserve and that should show up on this list
as well.
Okay, let's do that. I am in here. I am going to go ahead and start
this up.
It's going to remind me that we have to start up bufserve, so we will go ahead and
start that up first. Let's real quick jump back over here.
I will go ahead and click on Refresh and as you can see
there's a couple of new things on here. Here's that
Buff, Buffering Sub-system, and here's the,
I guess, the third instance of that OPC Interface. Remember these
two are dead connections. But, let's take a look at this.
It tells me again that this connected using
a Trust. That's the Trust name which
maps it to that identity, and the connection
just happened just a second ago. Now compare that
to this bufss. Now, remember,
bufss is not using that same Trust, so
notice we list here a different Trust. This is a
Trust in which -- well, we specifying this is
joined based on the credentials in this
Trust called Buffering Trust which is pointing us to that
identify, and we can see the connection started at the same
time as well. Now, all this information is available,
plus more, if you just scroll over here. As
I scroll over you can see, column by column,
the information about each of those connected clients.
Now let me demonstrate one more incoming connection.
I am going to go over here, and let's start up a copy
of the Pi System Management Tools.
You will also find that under Program Files, PI System.
Anyway, I will start this up and I will initiate a
connection to the server. And, by
initiating that connection, what we should see
is the connection show up over
on the Network Management Statistics, but
also we will find out how this was able to connect. So,
I will go into File, Connections. I will go ahead and
establish that connection. It's going to attempt to
connect. Now, this is telling me that it's connected as
VIRTUALLABS, and that's the same information we are going to
see over here. Let me go ahead and refresh this.
And now we have a new entry here. This is
SMT Host. That's System Management Tools.
And if we double-click on this -- as you can see
now, instead of connecting using a Trust
mechanism, this is using Windows Integrated Security.
So, this has identified the operating
system user as the user called
Administrator within this domain called VIRTUALLABS.
And, that particular
Admin... -- that particular
combination here is associated with
PI Admins as a group. Now that is handled
through Identities. Let me explain that again.
If we go back into Security and we look at Identities,
there is within here a Group called PI Admins
and you will find there's been
a mapping that maps that user,
VIRTUALLABS-Administrator, to that identify. So that's
how he becomes, you know, that, that
Windows user becomes a, a, member
of what we are calling the Admins Group.
And we saw that show up over here. See, he's,
he's being logged in as the PI Admins
Group. Now, in earlier videos, we
had taken a look in some real detail at these Message Logs.
The connections that you see here are the
incoming connections. They can be very obscure.
Let me make this a little bigger so that we can see some of these.
Yeah, so, for example, this is an example
right here of this SMT
host when it initially connected, etc.
So, how do you interpret what we are looking at
in this Message Log? Well, if you remember
how this connection works in general. Let me go ahead and close
this for a second. If you look at File Connections,
if you recall, if we go into Tools, Options,
we can see right here in this application
that the protocols we are going to use, and the order of this
protocol, is going to be -- we are going to first check
against Windows Security to see if somebody, a connecting
client, connects using that. If that fails,
we go into the PI Trust, and if that fails we go on to the
regular user. Now, if you know this sequence, it
helps to explain what you see in the Message Logs.
And, if you take a look at the Message Logs
shown in your book -- this is a Message Log of an
unsuccessful attempt -- you can see exactly the sequence that we are
following. Here, let me just highlight here. See, in,
in this particular sequence, we see that the first thing we
tried to do was to do a regular login
using Windows login here, but
that was unsuccessful. There was no identify mapped to
that particular Windows user. Now, the second thing we
did was we tried to see if there was a Trust.
We did that second check, and
as you can see here, we are getting a message saying there's no
Trust relation for this request, so that fails. And, then the third
thing we tried to do, is we tried to log in using the
default user that's configured with that connection.
And the default user was PI in, Admin, in
this case. And, in this case, they did not have access. They did not
provide the proper password, or whatever, so that failed as well.
So, as you can see, by, you know,
taking a look and understand this sequence right here, it
helps you to understand a little bit better what going on in that
Message Log. And, by the way, when it said the default user,
what we were talking about there is the default user
that we were specified right here in that connection.
And, one last thing that might help explain what you see in those Message
Logs is if you understand what the connection
credentials are that we are receiving from that client.
So, let me show you a nice little utility on the Interface
Node that you can run. So, I am, I"m in the Interface
Node here. I am going to just run the command prompt. I am
going to change to my PIPC-adm
Directory. So this is under Program Files.
It's under PIPC-adm.
And, it's a
file called -- well, there's not much in here. I can
just look at everything. It's a file called pidiag.
Pidiag has a dash
host switch that you can pass
to it. Now, what pidiag-host does
is it shows us all those credentials that, normally, we would get
from the connecting client. So, for example,
this tells me what the domain is. This particular
computer is in the domain called VIRTUALLABS. This is the name of the machine,
this machine name right here. The user
I am currently logged in in as administrator, this is its
IP Address. Fully-qualified domain name. All this
kind of stuff is fairly useful in doing some
troubleshooting. So now, when you are looking at your Message Log,
you can know exactly what messages to be looking for
for this particular computer.