The problems here are threatening to spiral out of control. We have two GPIB-ENET/100 boxes in use, one in my office and one in the lab. BOTH of them have become EXTREMELY unreliable. The extremely long delay I have observed appears directly tied to problems with the ENETs... Something (no idea what) happens to them, and they will not communicate with the computer anymore. I can still ping them, but in MAX, they are totally unresponsive, or at best, report (after ~5min) that they are incorrectly configured. As far as I can tell, they are configured correctly, and after I reboot the computer, the ENET, or both, the system will work fine... for a while. Hours... maybe a day or so. But then WHAMO, suddenly I cannot see instruments anymore and labview has locked itself up in some dll call that never (>5 mins has become never) returns. Even if I wait for it to come back, all I find out is that it didn't find any instruments and seems to have lost communication with the bus.
When the ENET is functioning correctly, I am observing VISA delays of only a second or two (which is fine) but the mean time between irritating phenomena related to the ENET is on the scale of hours and this is TOTALLY unacceptable. I realize I might sound a little miffed... not at anyone, just at this stupid situation with my GPIB busses. I am this close to scraping the GPIB ENETs, except that I am not sure what to replace them with... perhaps fiber extenders... our lab is fairly large and the computer cannot be physically close to the instrument racks. But I would rather solve the problem with the ENETs... only trouble is I am at my debugging wits end.
If anyone has some ideas, I would be very grateful :)
George Gatling Applied Technology Division, SFA Inc. Space Physics Simulation Chamber US Naval Research Laboratory 202-404-5405 (phone) 202-767-3553 (fax)
If trees could scream, would we be so cavalier about cutting them down?
We might, if they screamed all the time, for no good reason. --Jack Handy
