Joseph Doherty
4769044f88
Closes the two follow-ups left open by the MxGateway 0.2.0 bump. Reading the
gateway's own contract first changed what each of them is, and one of my earlier
claims was simply wrong -- both corrections are recorded below.
Replay gap
----------
A sentinel MxEvent carries family = UNSPECIFIED, so it fell through EventPump's
family switch into the default drop: we silently ignored a documented MUST ("you
missed events -- discard local state and re-snapshot"). It is now intercepted and
answered by re-issuing SubscribeBulk for every tracked subscription, since
MXAccess delivers an initial value per item on subscribe -- re-subscribing IS the
re-snapshot. It does not restart the event pump (the stream carrying the sentinel
is healthy, and the handler runs on that stream's own read loop, so disposing the
pump from there would deadlock on itself), it does not block the read loop, and
re-entry is gated so a burst collapses to one pass instead of a subscribe storm
per sentinel.
Handled on the READ loop, not in the dispatch loop, because everything past that
point is subject to newest-dropped channel pressure -- and "you missed events" is
the one signal whose loss is unrecoverable. Pinned by a test that fills the
channel and still expects the sentinel.
⚠️ This cannot fire in the shipped configuration, and I did not pretend otherwise
or paper over it by enabling resume. The gateway emits the sentinel only for a
stream opened with after_worker_sequence > 0; GatewayGalaxySubscriber passes 0,
which the gateway treats as "fresh stream, not a resume -- plain attach, no
replay, no sentinel". Enabling resume is a larger and genuinely delicate change:
the sequence is only meaningful within ONE gateway session, our reconnect
recreates the session, and replaying a remembered sequence against a fresh
session sets the server's live watermark ABOVE every event it is about to send --
silencing the stream instead of recovering it. That deserves its own change with
a live gate, which I cannot run from here.
Sparse arrays -- correcting the last commit message
---------------------------------------------------
I wrote that the bump "makes handling it possible" on the decode path. That is
wrong: MxSparseArray is documented write-only, the gateway expands it before
forwarding, and "the worker never receives or produces it". So the decode path
is unreachable by contract and the write path has no use for it either -- it is a
wire compaction for a WHOLE-array write, not a partial update (unmentioned
indices are RESET, deliberately, because the gateway cannot read-modify-write
without racing the provider). It is therefore the wrong primitive for an OPC UA
IndexRange write, which expects untouched elements preserved -- and WriteRequest
carries no IndexRange in the first place.
It is decoded anyway, as contract defence: the alternative if a future gateway
ever emits one is a silent null published under Good quality. Fill semantics
mirror the gateway's own SparseArrayExpander exactly (epoch for Time, empty
string, Integer widening to long[] when any element is int64) so a value that
round-trips through a write reads back as the same CLR array.
Also: the decoder is now total by contract, since it runs inside the dispatch
loop where an escaping exception kills dispatch for the life of the pump. A
malformed payload degrades instead of throwing.
A real defect found in the same code
------------------------------------
A stream the GATEWAY completes -- a closed or evicted session -- ends the RPC
without an error, so nothing threw, the supervisor was never notified, and the
pump exited silently. GetHealth() kept reporting Healthy, which also means the
#527 comms-loss watchdog could never trip, because it requires a non-Healthy
state. The driver went permanently deaf with no signal anywhere. This one is
live, unlike the two above. Now reported as a fault; the falsification control is
the existing CleanShutdown_DoesNotInvokeOnStreamFault, since our own disposal
also ends the stream and must NOT be reported.
Value kinds we cannot represent are now counted and warned once rather than
published as an indistinguishable null. The status is deliberately NOT downgraded
to Bad: nothing can reach that branch today, and changing what an OPC UA client
sees for a live shape is not a change to make without a gate. The counter exists
so the next person has evidence instead of a guess.
Verified: 330 Galaxy tests green (12 new), plus Galaxy.Browser 21, Runtime 558,
Core 351; full solution builds 0 errors with the warning census unchanged. Every
new test was falsified first -- disabling the gap interception reds 3 of 4 (the
throwing-callback test passes vacuously when the callback never runs, by
construction), disabling sparse decode plus the representability signal reds all
7 decoder tests, and both were restored and re-verified green.
Docs: the Galaxy.Performance invariant was stated as received = dispatched +
dropped + in-flight, which this breaks -- a sentinel is received but never enters
the channel -- so it now reads + replay_gaps. Galaxy.md gains the three
operational notes; DriverLifecycle.md records that "reaches a non-Healthy state"
is an obligation a driver can silently fail to meet, which is the general shape
of the clean-end bug.
OtOpcUa
OPC UA server (.NET 10 AnyCPU) that exposes a fleet of industrial drivers as a single OPC UA address space. Drivers ship in-process for AVEVA System Platform Galaxy (via the sibling mxaccessgw repo), Modbus TCP, Siemens S7, Allen-Bradley CIP (ControlLogix / CompactLogix), Allen-Bradley Legacy (SLC 500 / MicroLogix), Beckhoff TwinCAT (ADS), FANUC FOCAS, OPC UA Client (gateway), and MQTT (broker subscribe; Sparkplug B in progress).
A cross-platform client stack (.NET 10) — shared library, CLI, and Avalonia desktop app — connects to any OPC UA server.
Architecture
OPC UA Clients (CLI, Desktop UI, 3rd-party)
|
v
+-------------------------------------+
| OtOpcUa.Server (.NET 10 AnyCPU) |
| address space + capability fan-out|
+-------------------------------------+
| | | | | | | |
Galaxy Modbus S7 AbCip AbLeg TwinCAT FOCAS OpcUaClient MQTT
|
v
mxaccessgw (sibling repo, gRPC)
|
v
MXAccess COM (x86 worker, on AVEVA box)
Galaxy is the only driver with an external runtime: it speaks gRPC to a separately installed mxaccessgw server (sibling repo at c:\Users\dohertj2\Desktop\mxaccessgw\) which owns the MXAccess COM apartment and the x86/STA bitness constraint server-side. Everything in this repo is platform-agnostic .NET 10.
Prerequisites
- .NET 10 SDK (server, drivers, clients all target .NET 10)
- SQL Server reachable for the central config DB
- For Galaxy specifically: a running
mxaccessgwdeployment — see docs/v2/Galaxy.ParityRig.md - For historian read-back / alarm history / continuous historization: a running
ZB.MOM.WW.HistorianGatewaydeployment (the sole historian backend; consumed as theZB.MOM.WW.HistorianGateway.ClientgRPC package). It must runRuntimeDb:Enabled=true+RuntimeDb:EventReadsEnabled=true, and the API key must carryhistorian:read+historian:write+historian:tags:writescopes.
Quick Start
dotnet restore ZB.MOM.WW.OtOpcUa.slnx
dotnet build ZB.MOM.WW.OtOpcUa.slnx
dotnet test ZB.MOM.WW.OtOpcUa.slnx
# Run the server in dev (foreground)
dotnet run --project src/Server/ZB.MOM.WW.OtOpcUa.Host
The server starts on opc.tcp://localhost:4840 with the None security profile. Configure Security.Profiles in src/Server/ZB.MOM.WW.OtOpcUa.Host/appsettings.json to enable Basic256Sha256-Sign or Basic256Sha256-SignAndEncrypt. See docs/security.md.
Install as Windows Services
Production deployment is driven by scripts/install/Install-Services.ps1, which registers the OtOpcUa server service under a chosen service account. Historian support requires a separately deployed ZB.MOM.WW.HistorianGateway and Galaxy support a separately installed mxaccessgw — neither this repo nor the install script provisions them.
.\scripts\install\Install-Services.ps1 `
-InstallRoot 'C:\Program Files\OtOpcUa' `
-ServiceAccount 'DOMAIN\svc-otopcua'
The historian backend is the external ZB.MOM.WW.HistorianGateway (not installed by this script). See the script header and docs/ServiceHosting.md for full options.
Client CLI
dotnet run --project src/Client/ZB.MOM.WW.OtOpcUa.Client.CLI -- connect -u opc.tcp://localhost:4840
dotnet run --project src/Client/ZB.MOM.WW.OtOpcUa.Client.CLI -- browse -u opc.tcp://localhost:4840 -r -d 3
dotnet run --project src/Client/ZB.MOM.WW.OtOpcUa.Client.CLI -- read -u opc.tcp://localhost:4840 -n "ns=2;s=SomeNode"
dotnet run --project src/Client/ZB.MOM.WW.OtOpcUa.Client.CLI -- write -u opc.tcp://localhost:4840 -n "ns=2;s=SomeNode" -v 42
dotnet run --project src/Client/ZB.MOM.WW.OtOpcUa.Client.CLI -- subscribe -u opc.tcp://localhost:4840 -n "ns=2;s=SomeNode" -i 500
See docs/Client.CLI.md and docs/Client.UI.md.
Documentation
Architecture deep-dives
| Topic | Doc |
|---|---|
| OPC UA server composition, namespace fan-out, Polly invoker | docs/OpcUaServer.md |
| Address space layout | docs/AddressSpace.md |
| Read / Write dispatch (driver vs virtual vs scripted-alarm) | docs/ReadWriteOperations.md |
| Incremental sync (driver-backend rediscovery + config publishes) | docs/IncrementalSync.md |
| Service hosting (Server + Admin; external HistorianGateway backend) | docs/ServiceHosting.md |
| Security (transport, LDAP, certificates) | docs/security.md |
| Redundancy | docs/Redundancy.md |
| Status dashboard | docs/StatusDashboard.md |
Drivers
| Topic | Doc |
|---|---|
| Driver specs (per-driver capability surface, config, addressing) | docs/v2/driver-specs.md |
| Galaxy driver | docs/drivers/Galaxy.md |
| Modbus / S7 / AbCip / AbLegacy / TwinCAT / FOCAS / OpcUaClient / MQTT | docs/drivers/ |
| Galaxy parity rig (mxaccessgw setup) | docs/v2/Galaxy.ParityRig.md |
| Galaxy performance + tracing | docs/v2/Galaxy.Performance.md |
Clients
| Topic | Doc |
|---|---|
| Client CLI | docs/Client.CLI.md |
| Client UI (Avalonia desktop) | docs/Client.UI.md |
v1 archive
The original v1 in-process MXAccess docs (Galaxy.Host topology, Configuration env vars, AlarmTracking, DataTypeMapping, HistoricalDataAccess, Subscriptions, etc.) are preserved under docs/v1/ — historical reference only. PR 7.2 retired the v1 architecture on 2026-04-30; current state is documented in the sections above.
License
Internal use only.