Creating, losing, and recreating connections

The Interface is very persistent in creating and maintaining a connection with both the OPC AE server and PI. If either is not available at startup, the Interface logs an entry to the pipc.log file and retries the connection periodically. If the Interface loses the connection to the PI Data Archive, it continues to gather data and attempts to send it to PI, while it tries to re-establish the connection to PI. T is recommended to use the PI API buffering program (bufserv) to avoid losing data if PI is unavailable (See Buffering for PI Interfaces). If the Interface loses the connection to the OPC AE server it will try to re-establish that connection.

If the connection to PI is lost, the only indication on the PI side is that no data will be coming in.

If the connection to the OPC AE Server is lost because the server has been shutdown or has abnormally exited, the interface will try to re-establish the connection for the amount of time specified by the /FT startup parameter. If this time elapses and the connection cannot be re- established, the interface attempts to connect to the Backup OPC AE Server, if one has been specified. The above steps are repeated, and the interface tries again to connect to the Primary OPC AE Server if no connection can be made to the Backup OPC AE Server and the wait time has expired. This process continues until a connection is made to one of the two OPC AE Servers specified. The interface will stay on a given server, once connected, until that server fails.