As a tester you need to stay one step ahead of your average computer tech. That means you have to stay sharp, and continue adding to your knowledge base – often this means doing a lot of studying and learning on your own. So today I’m going to start by suggesting that you sharpen your UNIX and LINUX skill sets. You may already work on UNIX systems, and think that their days are numbered and soon you will only have to point and click your way around the world. I doubt it. Yes LINUX gives you a nice GUI to help Windows users feel comfortable, but that’s not where you’re going to work. You need to understand and make use of the power of the command line. Remember the old days when Win 3.11 was the new kid on the block but all your test programs only worked in DOS? The laptop soon became a very useful tool for troubleshooting and programming RTUs, Relay, communication, and metering equipment. It’s been a while, but I have yet to be totally sold on MS Vista. I’ve been patient, but so far I’ve not bought into the hype. Yes, it works and does everyday bread and butter business operations, but I don’t see it as the ultimate operating system of choice for a SCADA master - yet. If I’m wrong, please fill me in. I think a lot of IT people would like to see a point and click mindless approach to maintaining a SCADA system, but remember the easy road often leads down the slippery slope of disaster. For a basic HMI based system XP does a pretty good job. But for a big time system I still haven’t seen anything quite as powerful as UNIX. Yes, I know what you’re thinking; LINUX is UNIX for all practical purposes, and yes I do rely heavily on some Win 2003 and XP embedded systems to do certain types of support functions. Although I’ve migrated to Fedora for a lot of test functions, I think you would find the support associated with RHEL beneficial for peace of mind if nothing else. Red Hat split their OS between Fedora, and Red Hat Enterprise. Fedora is kind of a proving ground for RHEL. There are other distros of LINUX, so don’t limit yourself to only one. They all have very similar basic UNIX commands, so learn the basics first. If you’re already familiar with UNIX then learning LINUX should be reasonably simple. Unix is reliable, and that’s one of the reasons you find it in so many large server systems. A SCADA master is in its simplest terms a server that communicates with multiple clients. When you start talking about very large systems you soon realize that reliability and uptime are major concerns. I’ve had very good luck with Windows based machines for HMIs and data concentrator type functions. Windows is great for one on one simple SCADA work, but when you throw in extra requirements such as application processing interfaces you’ll see that a lot more work needs to be done by the system. What I’m driving at is the difference between a large HMI and a full-blown SCADA master. I still maintain the opinion that you can build a reasonable SCADA system on the Windows platform, but let me qualify that a little. When you start talking about a major league ultimate system you not just talking about a few hundred remote sites. You start talking about point counts beyond 32,000 and remote locations over 250 you might want to really think hard about how much work the system will have to deal with. For a Windows based system you might want to look into 64 bit applications. It’s possible, but you’d better be sure the system will handle not just the current job load, but also any future expansion to your system. How does this impact a tester? It means you can’t limit yourself to a Windows world. You need to understand how UNIX operates, and how to navigate through these systems. If you don’t know how things should work, then how will you know when they aren’t working properly? Any system you need to support you should not only understand, but also become very familiar with. Most testers already work on UNIX based subsystems and equipment. A lot of the old test equipment and software that first came out only worked in DOS. As our laptops and hardware became more and more reliant on Win 9X we all had to become very proficient working with multiple computer systems. Nothings changed, you still have to continue learning different operating systems, hardware and software applications. LINUX isn’t just limited to very large systems either. More and more you will see LINUX used for small applications and equipment. From very large systems to very small systems you will find LINUX as a major player. You may find it used not only at the center of a SCADA system, but used throughout so here you go, back to the command line. “The more things change the more they stay the same. ” I’m sure you’ve already heard that many times before