The IFR online detector control at the BaBar experiment

The instrumented flux return (IFR) is one of the five subdetectors of the BaBar experiment on the PEP II accelerator at SLAC. The IFR consists of 774 resistive plate chamber (RPC) detectors, covering an area of about 2,000 m/sup 2/ and equipped with 3,000 front-end electronic cards (FEC) reading about 50,000 channels (readout strips). The first aim of a B-factory experiment is to run continuously without any interruption and then the detector control system plays a very important role in order to reduce the dead-time due to the hardware problems.