George, I had a similar kind of problem years ago wit the initial version of the GPIB-ENET box, and the issue was supposed to be fixed in the /100 version, but who knows... who knows?
A behaviour identical to the one you are witnessing began to occur when we upgraded from 10 to 100Mb network and the box just could not cope any more with the amount of broadcast messages it was listening to without being at all interested in their contents. After long and protracted negotiations with NI, I managed to extract out of them another version of the firmware that was ignoring broadcast messages, but those were the days when you were not paying for support, so I could afford to pester them until they sorted me out. The second step towards fixing the problem was building my own private network. As mentioned by another subscriber, perhaps this is something you could try too without too much hassle. Hope this helps, Mihai Costache Senior Research & Development Engineer Industrial Research Ltd. Brooke House 24 Balfour Rd., Parnell PO Box 2225 Auckland, New Zealand DDI: +64 - 9 - 920 3645 Fax: +64 - 9 - 920 3106 www.irl.cri.nz **************************************************************************** **** Men stumble over the truth from time to time, but most pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing happened. Sir Winston Churchill (1874-1965) **************************************************************************** **** > > Subject: Re: VISA Refnum Delays & GPIB-ENET > From: "George Gatling (Contractor)" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Date: Tue, 04 May 2004 15:05:27 -0400 > > GRRRR!! > > 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
