LabVIEW Real-Time Idea Exchange

As cRIO's are deployed in ever growing applications, it would sure be nice if there was an option to use SFTP (and disable FTP altogheter) on the controller. Ideally it would be supported at the OS level, i.e. the existing cRIO FTP server is upgraded or extended to include SFTP as well.

If this is already supported, try searching for "sftp" or "crio sftp" and you'll see only one 3rd party tool-kit, but I confirmed with that company (Labwerx.net) that it (labSSH) does not support cRIO/FPGA/RT targets and there are no concrete plans to add support to other targets.

NI: I call on you to either create the FTP toolkit I need to write my own SFTP server, or better yet, update the cRIO FTP server to include the "s". . . It is only one letter, how hard can that be!? 😉 

If this is already possible through some (obscure?) way, please update your site-search engine to reckognize sftp and/or crio sftp, and/or link to a KB or Whitepaper on the topic as I did not find any.

(Note: cRIO safety and security IS covered in pretty good detail in the article series starting with Overview of Best Practices for Security on RIO Systems and the linked 3 articles.)

Currently a VI running in a Real Time environment does not support run time menus.  I understand the restriction, but what I find odd is VIs that have the menu reference wire cannot compile for RT targets.  This may seem like no big deal, because why would you have a menu reference wire, but not use it?  But I have come to find two examples that make RT code a bit more difficult due to this issue.

If I have a polymorphic VI, and one of the polymorphic types has a menu reference terminal, then I can't use that polymorphic VI in an RT VI, even if the instance that is being used doesn't use the menu reference.  One work around for this is to wrap the entire VI that does use the menu reference (terminals and all) in a conditional disable structure so that it does nothing on RT.

Another issue comes in the form of templates.  I have various temples to get code started, and most of it can run on RT or other targets without any need to change the code, just place conditional disable structures where needed.  But I found one issue where I can't have an event structure on RT, that has the Shortcut Menu Activation? event, because it generates a menu reference wire. Ideally this event just can't be generated on RT, so the compiler would know to not include it, and it would allow the VI to run on RT.  Same for polymorphic VIs that have a menu reference in one of its instances.

A better solution might be to lift all restrictions of using the menu reference wire on RT, and just assume that using the menu reference on RT does nothing, like a No-Op.  Optionally an error could be generated if one of the menu reference functions are used, but for the sake of simplicity I'm not sure that is needed.  What I'm really looking for, is a way to allow VIs to run on RT, that have menu reference wires types, but aren't used.  Note the VI below which can't run on RT and the reason given is that the menu reference can't be used on RT, but it isn't being used, it is just wired to a disabled case.