I have two ENETs that have been running for long periods of time with no problems. One has been running for over a year.
The only problem that I have seen was when some (fill-in-the-blank) network admin added another device to the network on the same static IP address as the ENET without talking to me. What would happen, is that I would reboot the ENET and it would work until the other device tried to access the network and then the ENET would just quit working. You could ping it and everything, but it would not respond just like you are describing. To find out that this was the problem, I turned off the ENET and pinged the IP address, and to my surprise I got a response. Then it was another headache trying to find the device that was on the same address. You could verify that it is not a network issue, by connecting the computer directly to the ENET with a cross-over cable and see if you still have the issues. Good luck. Timothy Rhoads Electronics Engineer BAE SYSTEMS - Battery Technology Center 1601 Research Blvd Rockville, MD 20850-3173 301.838.6247 (Voice) 301.838.6222 (Fax) [EMAIL PROTECTED] -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of George Gatling (Contractor) Sent: Tuesday, May 04, 2004 3:05 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: VISA Refnum Delays & GPIB-ENET 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
