Issue
How does Continuum synchronize a person's current area across controllers and what happens if a controller is offline at the time of synchronization?
Product Line
Andover Continuum
Environment
- All Continuum controllers that support physical access control
- CX9900
- CX9702
- CX9680
- ACX5720
- ACX5740
Cause
Understanding the synchronization process can help with troubleshooting issues.
Resolution
- Upon processing a valid access at a door the controller sends out a Personnel Update message to all peers controllers as well as down its Infinet for the benefit of ACX7xx field devices.
- Note that the message is sent out to ALL controllers that have been taught regardless of whether they are doing access control or not or whether they contain a distributed copy of the personnel object.
- The update personnel message includes the following information
- The time the update message was built
- The ID of the door where access was granted
- The handle ID of the personnel object that was granted access at the door
- The handle ID of the area the person was granted access to
- The time access was granted
- Upon receipt of the message, the recipient controllers performs a find by ID of the personnel object, if found the object’s current area is updated otherwise the message is discarded.
- The recipient controller must acknowledge receipt of the message, if it does not, the sending controller retries 3 times, if a controller is offline and misses the update the corresponding record in its database will be stale, this in turn may cause entry-egress and/or anti-passback not to operate correctly until the next update message is received.