Restarting Driver Services

Restarting Driver Services

If you have suspicious that a driver isn't working, hasn't been updated correctly, or you're seeing errors in the diagnostic reports or when running the driver interactively, you might want to start, stop or restart your driver services.

There are a few ways to do this, listed from least disruptive to most disruptive.

Option 1: Reload A Data Source

Reloading a driver is slightly different to restarting one. It forces a particular data source to update all of its data acquisition settings and disconnect and reconnect to the data source, but does not cause the driver service itself to restart. This means that if you have multiple connections on a particular protocol (ie. you are communicating to several different Modbus gateways), you can restart one particular connection without disrupting the others.

The steps to reload a data source are...

Go to Administration | Data Sources 
Choose the Data Source you would like to reload
At the bottom of the page, choose Reload Data Sources



However, for severe driver issues it will usually not be sufficient. If for any reason your driver has become unresponsive, it is unlikely to respond to a reload request.

Option 2: Restart a Driver Service

All ARDI drivers run as either Services (in Windows) or Daemons (in Linux), and can be restarted through the usual methods of restarting services on the respective platforms.

In Windows, access the server desktop (either physically or via RDP), open the Services application, search for the driver number ( you can find your driver numbers in Administration | Drivers ), right-click the service and choose Restart. You can also perform this action via Powershell commands. 

In Linux, type the following command...
  1. sudo service ardi-<drivernumber> restart

Option 3: Reload & Restart All Drivers

This is the most disruptive and most thorough method - this causes all of the driver services to be stopped, purged from your system and then recreated. As such, this process is quite disruptive to your live data, but should create a 'clean slate' driver environment.

Note that this process also restarts the consolidator service, which is the live-data endpoint for ARDI clients.

To do this, you need to...

Go to Administration | Drivers
Choose Restart / Update



Note that this process may take some time if you have multiple drivers.

Certain drivers may also take quite some time to re-connect (among these are the OPC-UA driver, which needs to map your OPC-UA tree before connection is complete). 

Please also note that just because a driver has started does not mean that it is connected. You can try driver diagnostics ( Administration | Drivers | Diagnostics ) or running your driver interactively if you need further debugging details.

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