Running Drivers Interactively

Running Drivers Interactively

This documentation can also be found as part of the standard ARDI documentation - it is reproduced here.
If you're having trouble with a driver or a connection, you can try manually launching it, otherwise known as running your driver interactively.

This way you'll see any errors that occur, without them being hidden by the service layer on Windows or Linux.

Driver Location

On Windows, drivers are located in C:\Program Files (x86)\Optrix\ARDI\drivers, while on Linux they are in /opt/ardi/drivers.

Live drivers are located in the 'live' subfolder. Historical drivers are located in the 'hist' subfolder.

Each driver is then located in its own subfolder.

Running the Driver

Most drivers are python scripts, although some windows-specific drivers may be executable files. Either way, they are manually launched from the terminal/command-line using the same syntax.

<driver_file> <port> <host>

You can find the correct port number for each driver in Administration | Drivers.

For example, if we wanted to manually start the live text driver that is set up for port 9102 on the testing database found on the local machine, we would…

  • Open a Console/Terminal
  • Go to the appropriate driver directory for our platform (ie. cd “C:\Program Files (x86)\Optrix\ARDI\drivers\live\text\” )
  • Enter the command below
text.py 9102 localhost/s/testing

If the command fails because Python isn't in your command-line, you could try the following…

c:\python38\python text.py 9102 localhost/s/testing

Note that if you only have one ARDI database on your system, the name for the database is default. So your command would be…

text.py 9102 localhost/s/default

Note that some Windows drivers may need to be run with administrative privileges. We suggest running them directly from an administrative command prompt.

User Permissions

If your driver requires elevated or domain-related permissions, please remember to launch your command prompt as the user in question (in Windows), or use su to switch to the user in question before launching the driver (in Linux)

On Windows, ARDI stores log files in the log folder of your ARDI installation. For example, it could be found on C:\Program Files (x86)\Optrix\ardi\log and on Linux in /var/log/ardi. You might need to provide permission for your user to create and modify files in these directories if you are launching drivers under non-system user accounts.

Closing Drivers

Use CTRL+C to close your driver. There can be a small delay between pressing the keyboard combination and the driver actually stopping. If for any reason it is unresponsive, you can also stop the driver from the Task Manager on Windows, or using 'kill -9' on Linux.

Substituting Drivers

You can also use this technique to substitute different drivers that use the same connection data - or testing drivers such as the zero, rnd or bad drivers.


    • Related Articles

    • 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 ...

    • BranchCache and ARDI

      Deploying BranchCache to an ARDI server may cause ARDI to be unavailable Issue Description When the BranchCache service is running on an ARDI server, you might not be able to access ARDI information. Explaination BranchCache is a tool used to share ...

    • ARDI and Port 80

      Using IIS on an ARDI server may cause ARDI to be unavailable Issue Description ARDI runs on the normal HTTP (web) network port. If you're running other services - such as Microsofts IIS or some versions of Skype - on port 80, ARDI will not be ...

    • Installing ARDI on Windows

      Getting ARDI up-and-running on Windows systems should take around 10 minutes. There are three key steps... Download and Run the Installer Upload your License Fingerprint Install your License File You can find the guide and a video demonstration of ...

    • Is there a Docker/container version of ARDI?

      Unfortunately, ARDI is not currently available in a Dockerised form. This is for several reasons: Docker containers are designed to run one service at a time. ARDI requires an absolute minimum of three, but dynamically changes to have many more as ...