Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] gr-ctrlport and multiple applications

[Tom Rondeau]

On Wed, May 15, 2013 at 9:42 AM, Alexandru Csete <address@hidden> wrote:
> Greetings,
>
> Today, we can configure gr-ctrlport to use a specific port. Doing so
> leads to a problem when trying to execute more than one gnuradio
> application even if they are not explicitly using controlport. The
> first application will take control of the network socket and the
> second will fail to start with:
>
> RuntimeError: Network.cpp:1104: Ice::SocketException:
> socket exception: Address already in use
>
> According to Ice documentation, I can specify a different
> configuration file for each application using ICE_CONFIG environment,
> but this seems to be overruled by the gnuradio runtime.
>
> Is there a way to configure controlport so that application A uses one
> port, application B uses another port, etc.?
>
> Is it possible to disable controlport at runtime?
>
> Alex

You can configure ControlPort through the preference files and set
enable/disable in ~/.gnuradio/config.conf using:

[ControlPort]
on = True

The 'config' option allows you to point to an ICE configuration file,
where you can define endpoints. One thing here is that you don't need
to set a port number for your endpoint, at which point it will select
an ephemeral port for you for each ControlPort app that's launched.
You can also not use a configuration file, and in this case, again, it
will find an open ephemeral port and enable it on all current
interfaces.

For programmatic control over if ControlPort is enabled/disabled in
your application, you can set the environmental variable. In Python, I
do it this way:

  os.environ['GR_CONF_CONTROLPORT_ON'] = 'True' (or 'False')

The environmental variables will override any settings in config.conf
or the installed gnuradio-runtime.conf settings and are checked every
time you query the preferences.

You should also be able to use:

  gr.prefs().set_string('ControlPort', 'On', 'False')

I'm not sure if how we have it set up allows you to easily set
different endpoints to different apps. Like I said, you can not
specify the port, and it will select one for you. But if you want to
control this for many different applications, maybe the best way is to
set the GR_CONF_CONTROLPORT_CONFIG variable (or with the
set_string('ControlPort', 'Config', 'FILENAME') method) for each
application to point to your different ICE config files.

Tom