I have a large number of fixed HMI clients at customer sites. If I want to create a Security Zone for example for a particular area of a site to which a number of HMIs belong to, in order to add these HMIs into the zone I have to enter their IP address and/or hostname. The issue here is that in 6month’s time, I don’t know what HMI that IP address ‘10.5.2.13’ is as there is no context that you can provide, other than using the security zone name to hopefully narrow down where it is. This might not narrow it down very far however depending on how and what security zones are defined and used.

My suggestion would be to add in another identifier section that accepts “Named Clients”.

Named Clients would then become a new section in the Gateway config to create a list of named clients so that clients are not just 10.5.2.13, they actually have some context behind them to pinpoint exactly where they are and what they’re used for.

For example:

Name IP Address Hostname Location Description

Client1Name 10.1.2.3 CLIENT1 Packaging bottling hall beside thingy Wine transfer client in packaging blah blah

Client2Name 10.1.2.4 CLIENT2 At base of rainbow Some other client

Then Client1Name for example would be used in the ‘Client Names’ Identifier section

As a bonus, this would also enable fixed HMI locations to be documented within the programme for reference later.

Additionally, it would be great if we could create these client names from the list of connected Vision clients and Perspective Sessions on the gateway status page.