CitectSCADA and CitectHMI

CitectSCADA 7.10r1

Readme

( updated 26 November 2008)

 

See the Release Notesfor information about problems fixed with this release.

See the Security Addendumfor information about security enhancements in this release.

What's in this Document?

  1. Restrictions and Limitations
  2. What’s New?
  3. Requirements
  4. Installation Notes
  5. Best Practice for Installation
  6. Upgrading
  7. Operational Notes
  8. Known Issues with this Release
  9. Disclaimers

    10. 1. Restrictions and Limitations

    Please note:

    • Internet Display Client is not compatible with Windows Vista®.
    • Virtualization with VMWare, the minimum system requirement is VMWorkstation6.03 and later.
    • 64 Bit support of CitectSCADA on VMWare® is currently not available/provided.
    • Drivers may be installed that are not compatible with Windows Vista®. They are included so that you can continue to compile projects for non-Vista client machines.
    • CitectSCADA Batch is not compatible with the Windows XP 64 bit operating system or the Windows Vista 32 or 64 bit operating system.

      • 2. What's New?

      CitectSCADA version 7.10 includes the following new features:

      • CitectSCADA Security Enhancements – See the Security Addendumfor information about security enhancements in this release.
      • Windows Integrated Security for Runtime - Allows security of your CitectSCADA Project at runtime to be managed using Windows Users andGroups. Please see the operational notessection for further information.
      • Multi -Signature Support – CitectSCADAnow provides the facility for up to four users to approve an action or tag write operation using the new Cicode functions MultiSignatureFormand MultiSignatureTagWrite.
      • Project DBF Add-in for Excel - a tool to assist editing CitectSCADA DBF’sfiles via Microsoft’s Excel® 2003 and 2007.
      • Enhanced Driver Installation –From v7.10the installation of these drivers is performed at the final stage of the product installation using a separate installation process. This installation process allows you to select individual drivers that you want to install, specific to your system and its I/O Devices.
      • New Font Selelectionfor Graphics Button -From v7.10the text displayed on a button object can be configured in the same manner as other CitectSCADAtextobjects within the Graphics Editor and the automation interface. This will allow you to present a more polished and consistent GUI to meet individual project runtime presentation requirements.
      • Vista Support - CitectSCADA now officially supports Microsoft’s Vista® (Service Pack 1). Due to security changes in Windows Vista, some modifications to the location of fileshave been made. These changes apply to all supported operating systems. See the Installation Guide for details of these changes.
      • Alarm Field Enhancements -It is now possible to write to the Custom Alarm fields during runtime and display them on the Alarm Display. Also two Alarm Properties have been added to enable CitectSCADA to interface with any third-party paging system. The Paging property is a flag to indicate that the alarm is going to be paged, the PagingGroupproperty is a freeform text field indicating the sequence of people to notify in the event the alarm occurred
      • Time Synchronization Service - provides a Vista® Ready Windows Service to accurately synchronize your computer from multiple sources. This service can be configured via the CitectSCADA Explorer.
      • Terminal Server Support – CitectSCADA now officially supports Microsoft Windows 2003 Server Terminal Services. See http://www.citect.com/citectscada for information.
      • VMWare Support – CitectSCADA now officially supports running on a Windows instance on VMWare® Infrastructure ( VMWare® Server - ESX) provided the operating system CitectSCADA is running under is a supported operating system.

        • For further information about new features, see the online help.

        3. Requirements

        3.1 Licensing

        You must upgrade your current CitectSCADA license key in order to run V7.10. To check if your Software Protection Key is capable of running Version 7.10 go to CitectSCADA Explorer > Help > Citect Key Update and verify the CitectSCADA Version is 7.1x.

        If your CitectSCADA Version is 7.0 you are entitled to a free upgrade to v7.10 . Use the Citect website Auth Code Generator to get a new authorization code at http://www.citect.com/authcode , or contact Citect Technical Support.

        If you need to update your version and you are NOT in Support and are not already licensed for Version 7.0 contact your local sales representative.

        3.2 Software

        Version 7.10 has been tested to run on:

        • Windows Vista® with Service Pack 1 (32 Bit and 64 Bit)
        • Windows XP® with Service Pack 2 and Service Pack 3 - (32 Bit and 64 Bit)
        • Windows Server® 2003 with Service Pack 1 (32 Bit)
        • Windows Server® 2008 (32 Bit)

          • Notes:

          • You must use Internet Explorer version 6.0 or above if using the Process Analyst, CitectSCADA Web Client, or CitectSCADA Web Server.
          • If you intend to use the Web Client on Windows 2000 or Windows 2003 Server, you must first install the latest Windows Installer module on your machine. This is available via the Windows Update feature in Windows 2000 or Windows 2003 Server.

            • 3.3 Minimum and recommended hardware and software:

            Refer to the CitectSCADA Installation and Configuration Guide provided on the DVD for this detailed information.

            4. Installation Notes

            In this release of CitectSCADA an Installation and Configuration Guide in PDF format is included with the documentation on the distribution disk. It is important that you read this document carefully prior to performing the installation to ensure a satisfactory installation of the software.

            When you insert the distribution disk in your drive and you have autostartenabled, CitectSCADA Setup starts up automatically to guide you with your installation choices. An alternative way to start CitectSCADA Setup is to double-click the setup.exe file that appears in the root directory of the distribution disk. We recommend that you use the CitectSCADA Setup utility to install our products as installing the individual product setups separately is not optimal.

            Notes:

            • To make installation easier, you can upload the contents of the CitectSCADA Installation DVD to your network and install from the network, rather than install CitectSCADA individually on each workstation from the installation DVD.
            • If when installing CitectSCADA you get the message 1607: Unable to install InstallShieldScripting Runtime, this indicates the Windows installer service has fallen into an illegal state. You must reregister the Windows installer service by executing the following commands at the command prompt:
              • C:\>msiexec.exe /unregister
              • C:\>msiexec.exe / regserver

              Only selected drivers are included in this release (see Restrictions and Limitations for further information on drivers). You can use the DriverWebutility at http://www.citect.com/driverwebto check that you have the latest versions of drivers.

              5. Best Practice for Installation

              To improve the security of your SCADA system and provide compatibility with Windows Vista, CitectSCADA 7.10 can now be run under a standard user account (i.e. one without administrator privileges). To achieve this, some modifications to the location of files installed by CitectSCADA have been made. These changes apply to all supported operating systems. Specifically, it is not possible for standard users to write to the Program Files or System directories, which means the citect.ini file cannot live in the Bin or Windows directory, and the User folder cannot live under Program Files. It is advisable that you accept the default installation path when installing, or ensure that your chosen User/Data folder is writable by standard users.

              When installed on Windows XP or earlier, configuration and project files are stored in the Documents and Settings/All Users/Application Data/Citect/CitectSCADA 7.10/ folder. When installed on Windows Vista, configuration and project files are stored in the ProgramData/Citect/CitectSCADA 7.10/ folder. Install locations are as follows:

               

              File type

              Platform

              Install Path

              Configuration files such as the citect.ini file

              Pre-Vista

              Documents and Settings/All Users/Application Data/Citect/CitectSCADA 7.10/Config

              Vista

              ProgramData /Citect/CitectSCADA 7.10/Conf ig

              User directory

              Pre-Vista

              Documents and Settings/All Users/Application Data/Citect/CitectSCADA 7.10/User

              Vista

              ProgramData /Citect/CitectSCADA 7.10/User

              Data directory

              Pre-Vista

              Documents and Settings/All Users/Application Data/Citect/CitectSCADA 7.10/Data

              Vista

              ProgramData /Citect/CitectSCADA 7.10/Data

              Log files

              All log files produced by drivers are written to a sub- foldercalled'Drivers'.

              Pre-Vista

              Documents and Settings/All Users/Application Data/Citect/CitectSCADA 7.10/Logs

              Vista

              ProgramData /Citect/CitectSCADA 7.10/Logs

              6. Upgrading

              For Version 6.10 users, before upgrading your projects it is important that you read and understand the Whats New and Upgrading sections of the online help, or the CitectSCADA User Guide, and the Migration section of the Installation Guide as significant structural changes occurred in Version 7.0. The ability to use Project Fonts inside buttons has been removed and replaced. (see What’s Newin online help). During project upgrade CitectSCADA will look up the project font being used by a button and convert it into the appropriate font properties on the Button.

              Windows enforces that all time manipulation requires Administration privileges. CitectSCADA has been changed to only require Standard User privileges and as a result means the existing  TimeSet cicode function is now obsolete. For time synchronization the new CitectSCADA Time Synchronization service should be used.

              7. Operational Notes

              Please note the following:

               

              Windows Integrated Security

              CitectSCADA User login security is performed both by the Client process and by any Server processes that the Client connects to. With a standard CitectSCADA user the full user credentials are configured in each projects, so the Client and Server processes both must match to be valid. With Windows Integrated Security, in a stand-alone system, all processes run on the same physical computer, so any Windows User can be successfully validated by both sides. For a networked system where the Client process is not on the same machine as the Server processes, only a Windows Domain User is allowed as it is able to be independently validated by a Domain Controller.

              Runtime-Graphics

              When using dynamic page resizing, please be aware that a change has been made to  scale (rather than stretch)all text regardless of whether it is static or dynamic text providing a smoother display.

              Vista Performance

              The Windows Vista environment introduced a radically different architecture with a significant increase in security checks that has impacted on application performance. Running CitectSCADA servers on a Windows Vista computer will incur a performance penalty and at this point in time is not recommended.

              Windows Firewall

              During CitectSCADA installation, if you are running Windows Vista or Windows XP SP2 and have the Windows Firewall enabled, you are given the option of allowing the CitectSCADA Setup to modify your firewall settings by adding CitectSCADA Runtime and FTP Server to the Windows Firewall’s list of authorized programs. If the Windows Firewall is not enabled, this dialog is not displayed.

              8. Known Issues with this Release

              The following are known problems which are not yet fixed in this release.

              38532- On Vista, when starting the WebClientafter starting the Display Client on the same computer an error message “Unexpected error;quitting” will appear. This error will appear for projects using the ItemList.exe ActiveX control, for example the CSV Example project. This issue can be worked around by either not running the WebClienton the same computer as a display client, or to first run the WebClientand then run the CitectSCADA Display client, and then restart the WebClient(if needed).

              41794- Batch fails to install on Windows Server 2003. This is because of legacy restrictions in the length of the install path for DAO. A workaround is to copy the whole 'Batch' folder on the DVD to the root drive (C:\ usually), and then run the Batch setup.exe from there.
               

              41810 - On Vista, when starting the WebClientwith CitectSCADA installed and with projects using the ItemList.exe and or MsgBox.exe ActiveX controls, for example the CSV Example project, a number of warning messages may appear. "A website wants to open web content using this program on your computer" will appear, followed by an error message: "iexplore.exe - Application Error".
              This issue can be worked around in several ways.

              Option A:

              Run the web client before installing CitectSCADA.

               

              Option B:

              1. Un-install CitectSCADA.

              2. Re-run the WebClientwith the project that uses the ActiveX servers.

              3. Re-install CitectSCADA.

               

              Option C:

              1. Un-register any ActiveX servers in the common files folder. ActiveX servers are ActiveX controls that have an .EXE extension.

                 1.1. Open a command prompt with Administrators privileges by going Start->All Programs->Accessories and right click on the command prompt menu item and click the Run as Administrator option.

                 1.2. goto Common program files by typing > cd% CommonProgramFiles%\Citect in the command prompt

                 1.3. Unregister the ItemListControl by typing > ItemList.exe / UnRegServerin the command prompt

                 1.4. Repeat the previous step with any other ActiveX Servers e.g. MsgBox.exe

                 1.5. thecommand prompt may now be closed.

              2. Re-run the WebClientwith the project that uses the ActiveX servers.

               

              Hotfixes

              The following are recent hotfixes for existing issues in v7.0 which have not been ported to the v7.10 code base. The status of these issues within v7.10 has not been tested.

              37854– High CPU on standby alarm server at startup.

              37867– Improvements in time needed to create all trend files from scratch.

              38453– Fix for missing comments when cicode TrnPrint () is used.

              38644– Crash in animator during cicode PageAnimate () when the background Cicode (the page event “while page shown”)  performs a call to the WinFree() Cicode function.

              38748- Alarm updates not sent to redundant server when [ALARM ] SaveStyle=4 set.

              38833– Tag values not updated on Standby I/O Dev when StandbyWritemode on a single I/O Server.

              39326- Active Alarms sometimes displaying at random on graphics in place of objects during runtime.

              40585– Cicode TagSubscribe () spawns a new cicode task on every execution. This can cause “Out of Cicode threads”.


              Performance Issues

              These issues are known to Citect and are being worked on in the next release. Tips and hints on how to improve results in the current v7x releases will be posted inside the Citect KB system at  http://www.citect.com/kbas an ongoing task. Please check here occasionally (particularly “Upgrade Issues”) for updates or subscribe to the RSS feed for real time updates. You will need a valid MyCitectusername and password.

              Cicode TagWrite()– TagWrite() performance is slower than in pre v7 versions. The visible affect of this maybe a slow down in system response depending on the volume of writes. This issue will be resolved in the next release of CitectSCADA.

              Cicode    TagInfoEx ( ) – TagInfoEx () performance is slower than the existing TagInfo() function. See KB 5136for some suggestions to improve this. This issue will be resolved in the next release of CitectSCADA.

              Page Updates - Page updates are slower than pre v7 when waiting for many tags to be read, especially if the source is from more than one IO Device. See KB 5129and KB 5136for some suggestions to improve this . This issue will be resolved in the next release of CitectSCADA.

              Analog variables - Analogreads cause greater system loading than pre v7 if used without deadbandsdefined. See KB 5137for information on how to set deadbands.

              Local Variables – Slow performance when local variables are used (local variables replaced “memory” tags from v7). See KB 5147. This issue will be resolved in the next release of CitectSCADA.

              Slow Startup– This occurs in a limited situation where no Internet access is available and certain network files are not available. See KB 5163for details and the work around.

              9. Disclaimers

              Disclaimer of All Warranties

              CITECT DISCLAIMS ANY AND ALL WARRANTIES WITH RESPECT TO CITECTSCADA AND THE RELATED DOCUMENTATION, WHETHER EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING SPECIFICALLY THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A GENERAL OR PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

              CITECTSCADA AND THE RELATED DOCUMENTATION ARE PROVIDED "AS IS," AND YOUR COMPANY UNDERSTANDS THAT IT ASSUMES ALL RISKS OF THEIR USE, QUALITY, AND PERFORMANCE.

              Disclaimer of Liability

              YOUR COMPANY AGREES AND ACKNOWLEDGES THAT CITECT SHALL HAVE NO LIABILITY WHATSOEVER TO YOUR COMPANY FOR ANY PROBLEMS IN OR CAUSED BY CITECTSCADA OR THE RELATED DOCUMENTATION, WHETHER DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, OR CONSEQUENTIAL (INCLUDING LOSS OF PROFITS).