In order to help clarify what I would like to see in not only version 10
of LinuxCnc but also in the current version 9 future work. I will start
working on this as soon as my new circuits board for my metal detectors
are populated with all the SMD components. The circuit blank circuit
boards arrived yesterday. This requires placing 235 SMD componets on
each of the boards and likely take about seven days.
My goal for LinuxCnc is to provide a way for any user to interface any
UI to LinuxCnc with a secure TCP network connection. LinuxCnc has had
such an interface from its inception via the NML network servers however
these are absolutely insecure and anyone with a bit of knowledge of
remote NML commands can take control of LinuxCnc if those network ports
are left open. Thus LinuxCnc needs modern secure network interfaces to
replace the ones that were designed in from the very start government
development and just ignored. Not many use this interface because it
does not provide complete information due to developers add-ons such as
Python that seem to just live in their own world within LinuxCnc and do
not provide any info into the NML network links. NML is likely the
hardest thing to deal with and very difficult to replace but in general
works just fine.
About 12 years ago I developed code to allow remote control of a lot of
time sensitive industrial and electronic equipment that was over 500
miles from the actual normal user interface. The equipment being
remotely controlled was located in a isolated area and without
communication links and thus those also had to be designed and
implemented. The overall bandwidth of the communication link was divided
into remote receive data, multiple command channels, status and error
channels. The system was designed for very high reliability and met all
design goals and is still in operation with some equipment updates
having been made.
The goal of me mentioning this is that I know that having a distributed
data system with equipment to be controlled in one location and the user
interface in an other more convenient location doe not have to suffer
from reliability issues when properly executed. What it does provide is
flexibility. In case of LinuxCnc which runs on Linux user interfaces and
there support requirements can be offloaded from the Linux system and
run on Windows based system instead or even on another Linux Based
computer. Which as I mentioned before reduces the need to load up the
machine control computer with support code that is not directly related
to its main function which if of course to control a machine and output
status info back to the user and process commands from the UI that may
be located some distance away and not in a noisy environment. There are
of coarse other ways to snoop into a Machine controller and some have
implemented one or more o those methods strictly because LinuxCnc does
not have a proper way of handing remote UI's.
I thing that even version 9 master has a good deal of the required code
to fix that problem by just adding some code to do some data routing and
adding some secure TCP channels. I have drawn a basic block diagram of
what would be required and attached it.
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