Software Toolbox Technical Blog

Software Toolbox has been involved with Industrial Automation communications for over 20 years now.  When you've done something for such a long time you can forget that many people in this industry or IT don’t know as much about the topic as they would like.

This second blog post to our "Why Your Industrial Protocol Matters" series shares a detailed overview of the SNMP communications protocol written by John Weber a number of years ago and still perfectly relevant today.   Over the last 15 years, there has been a great tendency to merge IT and Industrial networking together. One of the advantages of this practice is the increased usage of SNMP into the control/industrial network arena. For those without an IT background, this is key knowledge that we will see continue to grow.  If you missed our introduction blog post to this series and want to get caught up, you can access it here.

Software Toolbox has been involved with Industrial Automation communications for over 20 years now and some of us for even longer.  When you've done something for such a long time you can forget that many people in this industry or IT don’t know as much about the topic as they would like.

To help share the collective knowledge we've gained throughout the years, we're starting a series of articles on why protocols matter for getting the most out of your projects.

This introductory blog post to the series will discuss my insights starting out in this industry as an Applications Consultant at Software Toolbox with respect to just how important the actual communications protocol and understanding of its strengths and weaknesses can be to the success of a project.

The more regulated your industry, the more likely it is that you have a cybersecurity team that is extremely vigilant about gaps in security.  Traditionally, remote OPC tunneling has generally always required that network firewalls have at least one port open for data transfers to work successfully.

But what if you work in one of these highly regulated industries and your IT/cybersecurity department won't allow you to open any firewall ports for remote data sharing?

This blog post will discuss why it's important for a tunneler solution to support alternatives to the traditional methods of tunneling with open firewall ports to ensure network integrity.

The word tunneling, when it comes to industrial automation and data, typically goes together with OPC.  OPC tunneling is generally the most common form of tunneling, but what if your data sources aren't OPC?

What if you have more than just OPC clients and servers in your architecture and those non-OPC data sources have vital information that needs to be collected and shared with your other systems?

This blog post will discuss why it's  important for a tunneler solution to support more than just OPC-capable data sources in a diverse control system.

The letters O - P - C get thrown around a lot these days in the context of the industrial automation industry.  But it's important to understand that OPC is not a one-size-fits-all standard.  There are different specifications under the OPC umbrella and it's not a safe assumption that they are all just compatible with each other because they typically are not.

This blog post will discuss how important it is to know which OPC specifications you have in use and whether the OPC tunneler solution you have or are considering can handle them all.

So you just installed a Software Toolbox product and have run into a problem and you have exhausted all the normal troubleshooting steps – what do you do now?

The next step should be to give our support team a call, or shoot us an email. Whether you call or email, the moment you reach out to us a support ticket will be created and your support history is recorded in its entirety in our CRM system for future reference.

This blog post will cover how easy it is to access your current and historical cases with the Software Toolbox support team.

This is Part 10 of our “25 Things to Consider when Choosing an OPC Tunnel” series.  Are there ways to connect a Windows system to a non-Windows system with the Tunnel solution?

Since OPC was designed around DCOM, a Windows only technology, you simply do not find OPC Data Access Servers that are supported in a non-Windows environment.  Nonetheless, it's not unusual for control systems to have both Windows and non-Windows machines that need to share information.

This blog post will discuss how it can be possible to link Windows and non-Windows systems in your control systems.

In this blog, we will cover the built-in startup and testing features included in the TOP Server including a video link to see these tools in action.

These tools include a sample OPC client that can help with quickly testing connectivity to your devices, as well as device-to-server level and server-to-client level communication diagnostics. The user interface displays important informational messages, as well as communication warnings and errors. Also available is extensive and easy to navigate help documentation.

We’ll briefly discuss each of these tools and take a look at a video which walks us through the use of each of these tools and points us to further troubleshooting resources at Software Toolbox.