When trying to open Configuration studio in any engineering station or servers in Honeywell Experion PKS DCS I am getting an errors attached below , please help me to resolve these issues.

 

If you have a service agreement with Honeywell I would be contacting GTAC for help.

I have had a similar issue in the past with ControlBuilder when there were rogue disabled ethernet interfaces (Virtual Machine) left on the server after a version migration, the resolution was to find them in the registry and remove them. Make sure you check with GTAC first before you do anything to your system, more often than not they will resolve your issue on the first or second try.

 

Thanks Paul can you please tell me what is the path to registry where to find it in system.

 

If you have a service agreement with Honeywell I would be contacting GTAC for help.

I have had a similar issue in the past with ControlBuilder when there were rogue disabled ethernet interfaces (Virtual Machine) left on the server after a version migration, the resolution was to find them in the registry and remove them. Make sure you check with GTAC first before you do anything to your system, more often than not they will resolve your issue on the first or second try.

Thanks Paul can you please tell me what is the path to registry where to find it in system.

 

Hi aqib,

If this is a production system I highly recommend getting support from GTAC, as there could be many reasons why you are receiving this message which they will be able to resolve very quickly.

Interfaces are in the following location:
HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters\Interfaces

Each interface will have its own GUID key.

 

Hi aqib,

If this is a production system I highly recommend getting support from GTAC, as there could be many reasons why you are receiving this message which they will be able to resolve very quickly.

Interfaces are in the following location:
HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters\Interfaces

Each interface will have its own GUID key.

Hi Paul I am pleased to inform you that the problem is solved now, we found out that the D drive of the server is almost full and running out of the memory so we deleted some archive files to create disk space after that we try to open the configuration studio and it works, don't know is this the exact reason but it works.

 

Glad to hear you have got it sorted out. Might I suggest that you get some larger drives installed for your history/event and restored archives. Personally I have a RAID1 array dedicated to storing these archives, you can change the location of the history and event archives through the menus in Station but I don't know of a setting for the restored archives (archived history you loaded back onto the system) I just use mklink (symbolic link) to redirect them to another drive.

Honeywell by default stores archives separately from the C drive as well as the system can lock up if that drive fills as well.

 

Glad to hear you have got it sorted out. Might I suggest that you get some larger drives installed for your history/event and restored archives. Personally I have a RAID1 array dedicated to storing these archives, you can change the location of the history and event archives through the menus in Station but I don't know of a setting for the restored archives (archived history you loaded back onto the system) I just use mklink (symbolic link) to redirect them to another drive.

Honeywell by default stores archives separately from the C drive as well as the system can lock up if that drive fills as well.

Hi, Paul in our system history archives are being saved in D drive which is of 450 GB size and it gets full very quickly, yesterday I deleted nearly 140 GB of these files and today I checked the drive is showing 98% full. Could you please tell how these archives files are created and what is the time interval for creation of new files can we control it, It seems many duplicate files are being created which are eating up the drive space.

 

Hello Aqib,

From the system configuration menu in Station select History -> History Archiving.
In this display (sysCfgHistoryArchive.htm) you will find the settings for location, task frequency, offset and option to replicate to your backup server.

One thing to note if you are hard pressed for storage currently is that the archives are uncompressed files, if you browse to the root folder on both your servers where the archives are stored:
-Right click on the folder and select properties.
-On properties box that appears click on the advanced button on the general tab (bottom left corner).
-On the advanced attributes box that appears check the box for compress contents to save disk space and then click on 'ok'
-On the still open properties box click 'ok'
-You will then be prompted again and click 'ok' to apply this to this folder, subfolders and files.

This will allow windows to compress these files which should free up quite a bit of space until you can upgrade your storage for history.

I wouldn't recommend deleting your history archives as there is a lot of useful plant data that you will lose forever in doing so (archived history is not available unless loaded back in using the restored archive folder). Please use a program like 7zip to compress the archives and then move it to external storage.
Personally on my plant I keep the previous year (our plant is seasonal year to year) of archives loaded into the restored archives and anything older than the previous calendar year is compressed and sent to external storage.

 

Hi Paul, Thanks for the insights about saving history archives. I want to know your opinion on is the D drive of servers running out of memory can be the reason for control builder not working. Is this somewhat related with synchronization of Primary and Secondary Servers.

 

Hi aqib, normally Honeywell setup the D drive just for archiving (usually by creating another partition on the same drive array). The reason they do this is because if the C drive fills you will encounter lots of problems as this is where the ERDB and the RTDB resides as well as checkpoints etc.

Please check you have adequate storage on your C drive. Also what is the sync status of your servers, are all the status lights green on the server redundancy page in station (System hardware->Redundant Server->Status tab [sysServersRedSts.htm])?

 

Hi, Paul I have checked the server redundancy page in station and its showing like this can you help regarding this

 

Are you sure you have a redundant server setup, it should look similar to the following.

 

Hi, Paul sorry i made it bit confusing for you actually the screenshot i shared is not of the main plant servers it is from a demo server, In our plant we have two main servers i.e primary & secondary and a demo server is also there with a separate demo controller the control builder problem in the main servers is solved now as i told you before but in demo server it is still not solved.

 

When trying to open Configuration studio in any engineering station or servers in Honeywell Experion PKS DCS I am getting an errors attached below , please help me to resolve these issues.

Same issue faced and server not started successfully

 

Same issue faced and server not started successfully

If you don't have a HPS account make one. This is straight from HPS on that error code:
Article Detail

 

Hello Aqib,

From the system configuration menu in Station select History -> History Archiving.
In this display (sysCfgHistoryArchive.htm) you will find the settings for location, task frequency, offset and option to replicate to your backup server.

One thing to note if you are hard pressed for storage currently is that the archives are uncompressed files, if you browse to the root folder on both your servers where the archives are stored:
-Right click on the folder and select properties.
-On properties box that appears click on the advanced button on the general tab (bottom left corner).
-On the advanced attributes box that appears check the box for compress contents to save disk space and then click on 'ok'
-On the still open properties box click 'ok'
-You will then be prompted again and click 'ok' to apply this to this folder, subfolders and files.

This will allow windows to compress these files which should free up quite a bit of space until you can upgrade your storage for history.

I wouldn't recommend deleting your history archives as there is a lot of useful plant data that you will lose forever in doing so (archived history is not available unless loaded back in using the restored archive folder). Please use a program like 7zip to compress the archives and then move it to external storage.
Personally on my plant I keep the previous year (our plant is seasonal year to year) of archives loaded into the restored archives and anything older than the previous calendar year is compressed and sent to external storage.

I am also having some issues with epks server that has been offline for more than 3yrs .The server can not go to run mode drum to error:1068 and some sy6 service for Experion can not start. Some help please