How Do I Locate the Error Logs on My cRIO if I Don't Have MAX?

Issue Details

I have been given a cRIO with a deployed application and do not have MAX. How can I extract the error logs if I am seeing problems?

Solution

FTP the file with the relevant date and time of when your system last crashed or behaved unexpectedly. Here is a sequence of steps you can follow to achieve this: 

1. Open an application that can transfer files via FTP (example: Windows File Explorer or FileZilla).
2. In the FTP application, browse into your controller using its IP address.
3. Navigate to the directory specified for your operating system, in the table below. To find what operating system your cRIO is running reference this article. 

4. Within that folder you will find a series of log files in the format: lvlogMM-DD-YY-HR-MN-SC.txt (-month-day-year-hour-minute-second). Extract the one that best matches the date and time of the failure you saw. For example, in the file directory you can expect to see lvlog06-23-16-05-33-00.txt if the log was created on June 23, 2016 at 5:33 AM.

Additional Information

If any errors occurred in LabVIEW, you will find the LabVIEW Error Log within this file. If any Real-Time errors occurred then you will find the RTLog. From the RTLog section you can retrieve any information that might seem relevant to what you are seeing.

The normal procedure with MAX would have been to right-click on your cRIO controller and select to View Error Log, where you can look through the logs in the controller and find where there are RT errors or LabVIEW errors, and then choose to Create Report from that entry if needed.

For VxWorks OS, the c/tmp folder doesn't clear out the error log files. If you want to remove them you'll have to delete them manually or run a disk cleanup.