2.2. How to run xamineroot
Given a SpecTcl that's running, either locally, or remotely, that has set up the service ports as described in the previous section, you can run the program xamineroot to bring up a root interpreter that will maintain a set of histogram objects that wrap the histograms that have been bound the the SpecTcl shared display memory.
Note that if SpecTcl is running remotely, if necessary a mirror of its shared memory will be created transparently in the system in which you run xamineroot. The mirroring subsystem is smart enough to only create a single mirror for each SpecTcl shared memory source in any remote system. This means that if there's already a mirror for the SpecTcl you specify, your xamineroot will simply map to the shared memory of that mirror rather than set up a new mirror.
xamineroot accepts all of the Root command line options and parameters and adds the following additional options:
--hostThe value of this option is the host in which the SpecTcl you want xamineroot to attach to. This is an optional parameter. If omitted it defaults to localhost which specifies a SpecTcl running in the same system as xamineroot.
--restThe value of this option specifies either the number of the port on which SpecTcl's REST server is listening on or, if the port manager was used to allocate a port, the service name advertised by the port manager for that port.
--restis optional and, if not supplied, defaults to 8080. In general you should not allow this to default.--mirrorThe value of this option specifies either the number of the port SpecTcl's mirror server is listenin on or, if the port manager was used to allocated a port, the service name advertised by the port manager for that port.
--restis optional and, if not supplied, defaults to 8081. In general you should not allow this to default.--userThis option is only important if either the value of
--restor--mirrorare service names advertised by the port manager. In that case, the value of this option is the username of the account that advertised that service.If not suppled, rootxamine will determine the username under which it's running and use that to resolve service names to port numbers if needed.
Here are some sample invocations of rootxamine they assume at some point you've defined the environment variable SPECBIN to point to the bin subdirectory of the SpecTcl installation you're using (version 5.10-006 or higher).
Example 2-3. Invoking xamineroot
$SPECBIN/rootxamine$SPECBIN/rootxamine --rest=9000 --mirror=9100
$SPECBIN/rootxamine --host=somehost.frib.msu.edu \
-rest=SpecTcl_REST --mirror=SpecTcl_MIRROR $SPECBIN/rootxamine --host=somehost.frib.msu.edu \
-rest=SpecTcl_REST --mirror=SpecTcl_MIRROR --user=someuser
- This invocation uses all the default connection values: SpecTcl is assumed to run in the same host as us, the REST port is assumed to be 8080 and the mirror port is assumed to be 8081. Since the default values are all numeric ports, the user default value is irrelevant.
-
This invocation explicitly specifies numeric ports
for the REST server (9000) and the
mirror server (9100). By default,
SpecTcl is assumed to be running in the same host
as rootxamine.
The default value of
--useris irrelevant because numeric ports don't require resolving service names via the port manager. Note that this form also does allow
--hostto be specified and be remote in which case SpecTcl must be running in that host and supplying the services on the ports specified by--restand--mirror-
Specifies that SpecTcl is running in the host
somehost.frib.msu.edu. This
could be the local host or remote.
somehost.frib.msu.edu is,
evidently running the NSCLDAQ port manager as
the
--mirrorand--restvalues are service names not port numbers. rootxamine will resolve these services qualifying their names with the name of the user running rootxamine since no explicity--useroption was specified. Note that there's nothing to stop you from specifying a remote host and numeric port numbers. Note as well that the logic used to determine a host is local, in pretty much all cases will figure that out correctly and not setup up a mirror if that's not necessary.
- Same as the previous example but the service names are resolved for the user someuser which may or may not be the user running rootxamine. This user must be a valid user in the host somehost.frib.ms.edu.
Note that regardless of how rootxamine negotiates attachment with SpecTcl's shared memory (local or mirrored), the mapping that's done is readonly. Therefore operations that modify contents of the spectra will segfault rootxamine. The REST interface can do most things you might want to do that modify SpecTcl spectra. Check out the documentation of the REST server and client packages if you have those special needs.