Tracker features
This is to enable the tracker to be used in possibly disconnected networks.
Usually a tracked agent will agent_send its every move to the tracker, which must be accessible or it will not hear about the move. If the network situation does not allow this, local tracking can be used.
Here an agent will only send data to a tracking daemon on its own machine. Thus no network connectivity is required for the purposes of tracking. All the actions will be logged on their respective machines, and can later be read for display by the tracker.
Making an agent use local tracking
Specify a -localTracking <session name> option to the track command, eg
track -localTracking "my_session"
Manipulating the local tracking daemons
Two scripts are provided for the purpose:
- startLocal.tcl <machines>
- killLocal.tcl <machines>
The local trackers have to be running on all machines in the run to be tracked or pieces will be missed out with unpredictable results.
Gathering and displaying locally tracked runs
The tracker can be started with a -session option (see command line) to enable a run through one or more locally tracked sessions.
If this is the first time a particular local session will be displayed, the argument to -session should be new. Then the tracker will start up with a File menu:
where machines can be queried for local sessions started on them. Any number of machines can be entered in the prompt window.
Once they have all been scanned, a window of the sessions found will come up:
For each session, its start time, agent ID of the root agent, and session name are shown. the session name is the argument of the -localTracking option given to track in the tracked agent.
A selection of these can be picked, and the tracker will fetch all the necessary records. The run can then be started with "Start run" in the File menu.
The session so gathered can be saved in a file specified when selecting what sessions to find. It can then be rerun later without having to look for all the records on their separate machines.
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Saving runs for later playback
This can be be done (for normal tracking) using the -record and -read command line options. Runs are always saved, to trackRecord.log if no other file is specified with -record. See command line
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Tracker Home
Alex Iliev
Last modified: Wed Dec 23 16:06:44 1998