Replace a retiring router

Goal: an old router (or the routing built into a retiring PACS) is replaced by Routes, with the same behaviour, and the modalities move without a long outage.

1. Write down what the old router does

For each rule: who sends (AE titles, addresses), what is matched (modality, body part, station), where it goes, what is changed on the way (tag rewrites, compression), and when (schedules). Also: which senders ask for storage commitment, which query the worklist, and what queries go through it.

2. Map each rule to Routes

Old router	Routes
A sender or group of senders	A source (AE titles, IP ranges, ports)
A filter on header values	The source’s Header conditions
A destination	A destination
A rule “if… send to…”	A route, in order: specific above general
Primary and backup destinations	A group in Failover mode
Tag rewriting	Tag modifications, on the source or the destination
Compression for an archive	The destination’s transfer syntaxes
Time windows	The destination’s schedule
Anything else	A script

3. Test before moving anyone

• Route tester (Configuration › Route tester): for each sender, check which route takes its instances, and why others do not.
• Send test studies from a workstation (or any DICOM sender) as each modality’s AE title, and check History.
• If the destinations allow it, run both routers side by side for a while, the old one still in charge.

4. Move the modalities

• Easiest: give the router the old router’s address (DNS name or IP) and AE title, so modalities need no change. Accept the old router’s AE title as a called AE title on your sources, or leave Called AE titles empty.
• Otherwise: point modalities at the router’s DNS name, one at a time, watching each on Monitoring.

Keep the old router available, but not receiving, until every modality has moved.