Files
lmxopcua/docs
Joseph Doherty 5a7a08deca fix(drivers): detect mid-run comms loss and recover from it (#527)
DriverInstanceActor.DisconnectObserved had no production sender. The only paths
into Reconnecting were a failed *initial* connect and an operator's Force
Reconnect, so a driver that connected and then lost its device stayed Connected
indefinitely: publishing Bad for every tag, never re-initialising, and NOT
recovering when the device returned. PublishHealthSnapshot read GetHealth() for
reporting only and never acted on a driver reporting itself unhealthy.

Both comms-loss quality paths -- #477's native-condition annotation and #481's
scripted-alarm input fan-out -- hang off ConnectivityChanged, so both were
correctly wired to a signal that never fired.

The Connected health tick now evaluates a watchdog and self-sends
DisconnectObserved when the driver reports a non-Healthy state AND its
LastSuccessfulRead has been frozen for DefaultCommsLossTimeout (90s).

The conjunction is the design, and the issue's own proposal -- "non-Healthy for
N consecutive polls" -- is wrong. Degraded means *connected but some data is
bad*; several drivers write health per tag inside the read loop
(ModbusDriver.ReadAsync), so one unreadable address latches Degraded forever
against a perfectly reachable device, and a state-only watchdog would reconnect
that driver every 90s indefinitely -- worse than the bug. LastSuccessfulRead is
the honest evidence: preserved across Degraded/Faulted writes, advanced by any
success. The state check remains the second conjunct so an idle Healthy driver
with nothing subscribed is not declared dead for not reading.

Verified across all 12 drivers that a sustained failure does reach a non-Healthy
state -- nine poll drivers via Degraded, MQTT via live connection state, Galaxy
via its reconnect supervisor. CalculationDriver reports Healthy while running
and so can never trip, which is correct: it has no transport.

Also: the Reconnecting retry now calls ShutdownAsync before InitializeAsync.
ModbusDriver (_transport) and MqttDriver (_connection) overwrite an
IAsyncDisposable field inside InitializeAsync without disposing the previous
one, so re-initialising without a teardown leaks a socket per attempt -- latent
while only a manual Force Reconnect reached this path, but the watchdog makes it
automatic and unbounded (~360 leaks for an hour-long outage at the 10s retry).

Tests: 8 new in DriverInstanceActorCommsLossWatchdogTests, each absence
assertion carrying a positive control (a proven count of processed health-poll
ticks). Falsified five ways -- dropping either conjunct reds exactly the test
written for it, and removing the teardown, the null baseline, or the watchdog
call each reds its own guard.

Live gate PASSED on docker-dev (Modbus + otopcua-pymodbus-standard), run twice:
  - fixture stopped -> watchdog fires at ~108s, "declaring comms lost"
  - fan-out observed at Debug: "pushed BadNoCommunication for 2 mux ref(s)"
    (#481 Layer 4) and the #477 native-condition annotation on a driver
    owning conditions
  - fixture restarted -> reconnected in ~8s with NO node restart; both the raw
    (ns=2) and UNS (ns=3) NodeIds read Good with fresh timestamps

Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_015p7wGqy3YpZNCpDzTpGMKo
2026-07-31 10:58:38 -04:00
..

OtOpcUa documentation

Two tiers of documentation live here:

  • Current reference at the top level (docs/*.md) — describes what's shipped today. Start here for operator + integrator reference.
  • Implementation history + design notes at docs/v2/*.md — the authoritative plan + decision log the current reference is built from. Start here when you need the why behind an architectural choice, or when a top-level doc says "see plan.md § X".

The project was originally called LmxOpcUa (a single-driver Galaxy/MXAccess OPC UA server) and has since become OtOpcUa, a multi-driver OPC UA server platform. Any lingering LmxOpcUa-string in a path you see in docs is a deliberate residual (executable name lmxopcua-cli, client PKI folder {LocalAppData}/LmxOpcUaClient/) — fixing those requires migration shims + is tracked as follow-ups.

Platform overview

v2 (2026-05-26): the separate OtOpcUa.Server + OtOpcUa.Admin services fused into a single role-gated OtOpcUa.Host binary, joined by an Akka.NET cluster. See v2 design for the architectural decision.

  • Core owns shared abstractions (driver capability contracts, scripting, virtual tags, alarm historian).
  • Drivers plug in via capability interfaces in ZB.MOM.WW.OtOpcUa.Core.Abstractions: IDriver, IReadable, IWritable, ITagDiscovery, ISubscribable, IHostConnectivityProbe, IAlarmSource, IHistoryProvider, IPerCallHostResolver. Each driver opts into whichever it supports.
  • Host (src/Server/ZB.MOM.WW.OtOpcUa.Host) is the single fused binary (.NET 10, AnyCPU). OTOPCUA_ROLES env decides what to mount: admin (Blazor + control-plane singletons), driver (OPC UA endpoint + per-node actors), or both. See ServiceHosting.md.
  • Cluster + ControlPlane + Runtime + AdminUI + Security sit between Core and Host. The cluster glues per-node actors into one logical fleet; the control-plane singletons (deploy coordinator, audit writer, redundancy state) live on the admin role-leader. See Redundancy.md.
  • The Galaxy driver still reaches MXAccess via gRPC to a separately-installed mxaccessgw sidecar (sibling repo).

Where to find what

Architecture + data-path reference

Doc Covers
OpcUaServer.md Top-level server architecture — Core, driver dispatch, Config DB, generations
AddressSpace.md GenericDriverNodeManager + ITagDiscovery + IAddressSpaceBuilder
ReadWriteOperations.md OPC UA Read/Write → CapabilityInvoker → IReadable/IWritable
DriverLifecycle.md Server-side driver lifecycle + infrastructure contracts (IDriverFactory, IDriverProbe, IDriverHealthPublisher, IDriverConfigEditor, IHistorianDataSource) + the Commons library
Subscriptions.md Monitored items → ISubscribable + per-driver subscription refcount (v1 archive)
AlarmTracking.md IAlarmSource + AlarmSurfaceInvoker + OPC UA alarm conditions — native Galaxy alarms end-to-end (live)
AlarmTracking.md Original alarm-tracking write-up (v1 archive)
AlarmHistorian.md Core.AlarmHistorian store-and-forward sink — LocalDbStoreAndForwardSink, the replicated alarm_sf_events buffer + Primary-only drain, IAlarmHistorianWriter, dead-letter/retry/eviction
DataTypeMapping.md Per-driver DriverAttributeInfo → OPC UA variable types (v1 archive — live mapping is in src/Drivers/ZB.MOM.WW.OtOpcUa.Driver.Galaxy/Browse/DataTypeMap.cs)
IncrementalSync.md Address-space rebuild on redeploy + sp_ComputeGenerationDiff
HistoricalDataAccess.md IHistoryProvider as a per-driver optional capability (v1 archive)
VirtualTags.md Core.Scripting + Core.VirtualTags — Roslyn script sandbox, engine, dispatch alongside driver tags
ScriptEditor.md Monaco script editor — Roslyn-backed IntelliSense (completions, diagnostics, hover, tag-path) for C# virtual-tag scripts; AdminUI/ScriptAnalysis/ backend
ScriptedAlarms.md Core.ScriptedAlarms — script-predicate IAlarmSource + Part 9 state machine

One Core subsystem is shipped without a dedicated top-level doc; see the section in the linked doc:

Project See
Analyzers (Roslyn OTOPCUA0001) security.md § OTOPCUA0001 Analyzer

Drivers

Doc Covers
drivers/README.md Index of the eight shipped drivers + capability matrix
drivers/Galaxy.md Galaxy driver — in-process gRPC client to the mxaccessgw sidecar
v1/drivers/Galaxy-Repository.md Galaxy-specific discovery via the ZB SQL database (v1 archive — the gateway owns this path now)

For Modbus / S7 / AB CIP / AB Legacy / TwinCAT / FOCAS / OPC UA Client specifics, see v2/driver-specs.md.

Operational

Doc Covers
Configuration.md Live appsettings + environment-variable reference (current state)
Configuration.md appsettings bootstrap + Config DB + Admin UI draft/publish (v1 archive — OTOPCUA_GALAXY_* env vars now live in mxaccessgw config)
Uns.md The global /uns master tree — manage Area/Line/Equipment/Tag/VirtualTag fleet-wide; replaces the per-cluster UNS/Equipment/Tags tabs
security.md Transport security profiles, LDAP auth, ACL trie, role grants, OTOPCUA0001 analyzer
Redundancy.md RedundancyStateActor (cluster-scoped singleton), ServiceLevelCalculator, IRedundancyRoleView, per-cluster meshes, Prometheus metrics
Reservations.md Fleet-wide ZTag / SAPID external-ID reservations — publish-time claim, release flow
ServiceHosting.md Single fused OtOpcUa.Host binary install/uninstall with OTOPCUA_ROLES gating; the historian backend is the external HistorianGateway
StatusDashboard.md Pointer — superseded by v2/admin-ui.md

Client tooling

Doc Covers
Client.CLI.md otopcua-cli — OPC UA command-line client
Client.UI.md Avalonia desktop client
DriverClis.md Driver test-client CLIs — index + shared commands
Driver.Modbus.Cli.md otopcua-modbus-cli — Modbus-TCP
Driver.AbCip.Cli.md otopcua-abcip-cli — ControlLogix / CompactLogix / Micro800 / GuardLogix
Driver.AbLegacy.Cli.md otopcua-ablegacy-cli — SLC / MicroLogix / PLC-5 (PCCC)
Driver.S7.Cli.md otopcua-s7-cli — Siemens S7-300 / S7-400 / S7-1200 / S7-1500
Driver.TwinCAT.Cli.md otopcua-twincat-cli — Beckhoff TwinCAT 2/3 ADS
Driver.FOCAS.Cli.md otopcua-focas-cli — Fanuc FOCAS/2 CNC

Requirements

Doc Covers
reqs/HighLevelReqs.md HLRs — numbered system-level requirements
reqs/OpcUaServerReqs.md OPC UA server-layer reqs
v1/reqs/ServiceHostReqs.md Per-process hosting reqs (v1 archive — only OtOpcUa server hosting remains in scope post-PR-7.2)
reqs/ClientRequirements.md Client CLI + UI reqs
v1/reqs/GalaxyRepositoryReqs.md Galaxy-scoped repository reqs (v1 archive — owned by mxaccessgw today)
v1/reqs/MxAccessClientReqs.md Galaxy-scoped MXAccess reqs (v1 archive — owned by mxaccessgw today)
reqs/StatusDashboardReqs.md Pointer — superseded by Admin UI

Implementation history (docs/v2/)

Design decisions + phase plans + execution notes. Load-bearing cross-references from the top-level docs:

v1 archive

The v1 in-process MXAccess architecture (Galaxy.Host + Galaxy.Proxy + Galaxy.Shared, .NET 4.8 x86 COM, the OtOpcUaGalaxyHost Windows service) was retired in PR 7.2 (2026-04-30, commit ae7106d). Docs that described that shape are kept under v1/ as historical record — see v1/README.md for the index.