capture parallel data
I've been handed an interesting problem at work. We have a new
microwave system going live. Alarm processor is a PC acting
essentially as a dumb terminal, logging all alarms to the screen and
dumping them to a parallel printer. While the techs are in the process
of bringing stations on line, the system is generating a lot of alarms.
A LOT of alarms. Most of the alarms are not very important and will go
away as the techs get things tweaked up. Problem is the occasional
show stopper mixed in with all the trivial stuff.
At present it's pretty much a full time job for somebody to keep an eye
on all those alarms to make sure nothing critical goes by unnoticed.
I've been asked to come up with a way to monitor the alarms so it
doesn't tie a person down. The software on the alarm console is
proprietary (natch) and stupid. AFAICT it can't be programmed at all.
It doesn't have any provision to export data in any form other than
what's on the screen or what it dumps to the printer in real time.
I need a way to capture that data and ship it to my linux box. I won't
have direct access to the PC, we'll have to ship the data over the
house network in one form or another. One of the techs thinks he can
come up with a way to capture the parallel data between the PC and the
printer and convert it to ether or serial. If so we could ship that to
my linux box. I would not have any control over the data, I would have
to catch it as it comes. If I can do that, then I could parse it with
perl, sift out the important stuff and page somebody or whatever.
Has anyone done anything like that? If I can get the data into my box
I can handle it from there, but I've never tried to capture data on the
fly. Any suggestions would be welcome.
--
Bud Rogers <budr@sirinet.net> http://www.sirinet.net/~budr
All things in moderation. And not too much moderation either.
--
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-request@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmaster@lists.debian.org
Reply to: