Gateway Setup
Important Gateway Settings
The Gateway is at the heart of the Ignition software. It runs as a web server and you can access it through a web browser. Once running, you can get various status information about the Gateway, access important functions from the Gateway Control Utility, and customize the Gateway's homepage to fit your needs. Here's a description of all the settings and list of all the their associated properties that you will need to setup based on your Gateway configuration and preferences.
Required Roles
There are several properties that are required to access certain sections of the Gateway.
| Property | Description |
|---|---|
| Gateway Config Role(s) | Allows you to enter roles to control access to the Gateway Configure section. |
| Status Page Role(s) | Allows you to enter roles to control access to the Gateway Status section. |
| Home Page Role(s) | Allows you to enter roles to control access to the Gateway Home section. |
| Designer Role(s) | Allows you to enter roles to control access to the Designer. |
Web-Launch Settings
Web-launching technology lets you launch a full-fledged application with zero installation just by clicking a link on a webpage. This is how both the Designer, where you'll configure your projects, and the Ignition Vision Client, where you can view your projects.
Local Client Fallback Settings
Ignition provides a Local Client Fallback mechanism that lets you use a Gateway running on the local machine. If the Gateway is lost, the Client can automatically retarget to a project that you specify in the local in the local Gateway.
Scheduled Backups
The Scheduled Backup Settings control the Gateway's scheduled backup system. This system is capable of automatically making a Gateway backup and storing it to a folder path, which can be a network path.
When you enable this system, you must specify a destination folder. This can be a local folder, for example C:\backups or /var/backups , or a network path such as \\fileserver\backups.
The scheduled backup system works on a schedule that is specified using UNIX Crontab syntax. This is a standard format for specifying a basic schedule. The format consists of five space-separated fields, one for minute, hour, day-of-month, month, and day-of-week. The special Gateway Configuration 72 character * means all. Slashes can be used to indicate that values should be stepped, for example, */5 in the minutes field means "every 5 minutes", or 0:00, 0;05, 0:10, etc.
| Example Syntax | Schedule Result |
|---|---|
| 0 1 5 * * | Once a month, on the 5th day at 1am |
| 5 * * * * | Once an hour, on the :05 minute. 0:05, 1:05, 2:05, etc. |
| 30 5 * * | Mon Every Monday at 5:30am |
| 6-14 * * | Every minute, but only between 6am and 2pm |
| /5 8-17 * 1-5 | Every 5 minutes between 8am and 5pm but only during the week (1-5). 0=Sunday,1=Monday, etc. |
| /15 * * * | Every 15 minutes, on the quarter-hour. 0:15, 0:30, 0:45; 1:00, 1:15, etc. |
If something is wrong with the scheduled backup system, it will store error messages to the Gateway logs.
Error Reporting Settings
When an error occurs in the Client or Designer, the users can click a link on the Details tab to report the error via email.
These settings define how the errors are reported.
Multicast Settings
These properties allow the Gateway to broadcast information about itself via multicast UDP packets. This allows the Gateway to be discoverable by any components that are also listening to the same multicast address.
For example, native client launchers listen on a multicast address to provide a list of available Gateways on the network. Verify that the send ports and receive ports are open on the Gateway machine in order to be able to broadcast multicast message.
Gateway Property Reference
After you launch the Gateway, you can define the high-level settings that apply to the entire Gateway by going to the Configuration > Gateway Settings page. From this page, you can use the default values or define a new setting.
Gateway Settings
| Property | Description |
|---|---|
| System Name | Is a unique name for this Ignition installation. It is used to distinguish this server from others on the network when working with multiple Ignition installations. |
| System User Source | Is the user source used to secure access to the Gateway, as well as to the Designer. |
| Gateway Config Role(s) | Is a comma-separated list of roles, one of which is required to log into the Gateway's configuration section. These roles must be defined in the System User Source. |
| Status Page Role(s) | The required roles to access the Gateway's Status section. Leave blank to remove security restrictions for this section. |
| Home Page Role(s) | The required roles to access the Gateway's Home section. Leave blank to remove security restrictions for this section. Note that this is only used to limit the access to the homepage itself, each project has its own user source for limiting access to the runtimes. |
| Designer Role(s) | Users must belong to one of these roles in order to have access for logging into the Designer. Multiple roles can be specified by separating them with commas. |
| Create Project Role(s) | Users must belong to one of these roles in order to create a new Designer project. Multiple roles can be specified by separating them with commas. |
| Global Resource Protection | The roles required to protect or modify a protected global resource such as an alarm pipeline. If blank, anyone that can log into the Designer can protect global resources. |
| Allow User Admin | Allows the administration of the Gateway's system user source from the Designer and Client. Unless this is enabled, anything outside of the Gateway Configure page is prevented from altering the Gateway's system user source. |
| Allow Designer SSO | Allows single-sign-on authentication for logging into the Designer if the Gateway user source supports it. |
| Use SSL | Forces the clients to use SSL encrypted communication when talking to the Gateway. It is highly recommended that you purchase and install a genuine SSL certificate if you use this option. See Installing a Genuine SSL Certificate. |
| Persist Alarms | Whether or not alarm properties such as acknowledgment should persist across Gateway restarts. |
| Gateway Audit Profile | New in 7.9.13 The name of the audit profile that gateway-scoped actions will log to. |
Web-Launch Settings
| Property | Description |
|---|---|
| Launch Link Script Policy | Controls how the HTML that launches Clients and Designer functions. If set to JavaScript, the links use javascript to attempt to launch directly using the Java browser plugin. If set to Direct, the links are direct links to the *.jnlp files that launch the Client or Designer. |
| Allowed JREs | A semicolon separated list of allowed JREs for web-launching Clients and Designers. For example, 1.7;1.8;9 allows Java 7, Java 8, and Java 9. New in 7.9.8 If the JRE is the default list of 1.8;1.7;1.6 then it will automatically be updated to include Java 9 with 9,1.8;1.7;1.6; on startup. If this is not desired, it can be manually adjusted again afterwards to be a customized list with a semicolon at the end, which will prevent it from being overwritten again. |
| Designer Memory | The maximum amount of memory that the Designer has access to. |
| Disable Direct3D/Disable DirectDraw | These properties affect launched Clients and Designers on Windows OS only. These flags control whether or not the Java Swing windowing subsystem may use Direct3D and/or DirectDraw. Disabling these features can incur a performance penalty, but might be required for some video cards that have faulty DirectX drivers. |
Local Client Fallback
| Property | Description |
|---|---|
| Enable Local Fallback | Enables a client to fall back to a project in a local Gateway if communication is lost to the central Gateway. Note that port 6501 must be open on the local machine. |
| Seconds Before Failover | The number of seconds to wait before switching to the local Gateway project after communication loss. |
| Fallback Project | The local project to use during fallback. |
Scheduled Backup Settings
| Property | Description |
|---|---|
| Enable Scheduled Backups | Enables the scheduled backup system which automatically makes backups at a scheduled time. |
| Backup Folder | A path to a folder in which to put the scheduled backups. |
| Backup Schedule | A UNIX 'crontab' format scheduling string representing when to make the backups. |
| Retention Count | The number of backups to keep in the backup folder. |
Error Reporting
| Property | Description |
|---|---|
| SMTP Server | When not blank, user-reported errors are emailed using this SMTP server. |
| To Address | The email address(es) that will receive the error notification. Separate multiple email addresses with a semicolon (;) |
| From Address | The email address that the error notification is from. |
| SMTP Username | A username for the SMTP server, if required. |
| Change Password? | Check this box to change the existing password. |
| Password | A password for the SMTP server, if required. |
| Password | Re-type password for verification. |
Multicast Settings
| Property | Description |
|---|---|
| Enable Multicast | Allows this Gateway to be discoverable on your local network. |
| Multicast IP Address | Gateway messages are broadcast on this address. |
| Send Port | This port must be open on this machine to send multicast messages. |
| Receive Port | This port must be open on any machine that will receive multicast messages. |
| Message Interval | The interval in milliseconds at which multicast messages will be sent. |
Gatway Status Pages
You can monitor the Ignition Gateway from the Status section of the Gateway or from the Gateway Control Utility (GCU).
The Status section provides detailed information relating to the following:
| System | Description |
|---|---|
| Overview | Provides a top-down view of many of the components of your Gateway. This view is also useful for determining what step might be next when setting up your Ignition Gateway for the first time. You can view the status of your database connections, device connections, OPC connections, the number of open Clients and the number of open Designers. |
| Performance | Displays the performance status for the Ignition system such as CPU, Memory and Threads. |
| Alarm Pipelines | Shows the status details about the alarm pipelines. You can see the status of an alarm and where the alarm is in the pipeline. |
| Gateway Scripts | Shows status details about all the scripts that are running in Gateway. You can see information such as their execution status, whether the scripts are running or not, and so on. |
| Modules | A list of installed modules, their status, as well information about their version and current license state. |
| Redundancy | Lists information about the current state of Redundancy in Ignition. This information is only helpful when connected to another redundant Ignition server. |
| Reports | Displays information about the current and scheduled reports on the Gateway if you are using the Reporting module. |
| SFCs | Displays information about SFC instances. |
| Voice Alarming | Shows in-progress and queued Voice Notifications. This section only appears if the Voice Notification Module is installed. |
| Tags | Lists information and statistics about all configured Tag Providers as well as a view into the Tag subscription model, scan classes, and what tags it is currently subscribed to. |
| EAM Tasks | Displays information about the current and scheduled tasks for the Gateway Area Network if you are using the EAM module. |
| Transaction Groups | Displays information about the current Transaction Groups. |
Starting and Stopping the Gateway
After installation, the Gateway starts automatically. You can manually stop and start the service. Depending on the platform you are using, the following is how you can manually start and stop the Gateway. You can manually start and stop the Ignition Gateway through the Gateway Control Utility, or through your operating system.
Windows
Access the service control utility at Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Services. Then use the Ignition Gateway service to control the run state of the Gateway.
Linux
You can control the service using the ignition.sh script. It can be called with the start and stop parameters to perform the relevant operations.
./ignition.sh start
Mac OS X
You can access the service from the install directory using the "ignition.sh" script. On a typical Mac install using the dmg installer, the full command (without a custom location specified) is the following:
/usr/local/ignition/ignition.sh start