Secure network for beamline control

In SPring-8, beamline control system is constructed with a highly available distributed network system. The socket based communication protocol is use d for the beamline control mainly. Beamline users can control the equipment by sending simple control commands to a server process, which is running o n a beamline-managing computer (Ohata et al,, SPring-8 beamline control sys tem, ICALEPCS'99, Trieste, Italy, 1999). At the beginning the network was b ased on the shared topology at all beamlines. Consequently, it has a risk f or misapplication of the user's program to access different machines on the network system cross over beamlines. It is serious problem for the SPring- 8 beamline control system, because all beamlines controlled with unified so ftware interfaces. We introduced the switching technology and the firewalls to support network access control. Also the virtual networking (VLAN: IEEE 802.1Q) and the gigabit Ethernet technology (IEEE 802.3ab) are introduced. Thus the network security and the reliability are guaranteed at the higher level in SPring-8 beamline. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights rese rved.