Agilent Intuilink

[J.B. Wood]

Hello, all. This isn't exactly a LabView issue (although I do use
LabView with my Agilent test eqipment). I have three Agilent test
instruments, an E5070B RF network analyzer, E4438C sig gen and an E4440
spectrum analyzer all connected on the same local area network (LAN).
When not requiring LabView, I connect to, and obtain data from, these
instruments using the Intuilink toolbars installed into MS Excel and MS
Word on a WinXP SP2 computer. Everything works fine as long as all 3
Agilent equipments are powered up. When I need only one instrument and
use the "connect to" toolbar item the "Searching busses" dialog box pops
up as usual but nothing else happens. After sniffing some IP packets on
the test instrument LAN I determined I had either an address resolution
protocol (ARP) or remote procedure call (RPC) problem in trying to
address the powered-off items. Putting static entries into the WinXP
ARP cache does not eliminate the RPC problem. Apparently the Intuilink
configuration cannot proceed (or perhaps the timeout is excessive) if
the configuration is trying to address some, but not all, powered-down
instruments. Does anyone know a work around other than having to power
up all three instruments? This is not a problem when using LabView.
Thanks for your time and ocmment. Sincerely,

[Jeremy_B]

Hi J.B.,

Is there any specific problem with powering up all three instruments?  I'm not sure if we'll be able to offer much assistance on problems with an Agilent product.

[J. B. Wood]

In article <1214343606853-731070@exchange.ni.com>, Jeremy_B <x@no.email> wrote:

> Hi J.B.,Is there any specific problem with powering up all three
instruments?&nbsp; I'm not sure if we'll be able to offer much assistance
on problems with an Agilent product.

Hello, and thanks for the only response thus far. I knew it was somewhat
OT when I put up my OP but figured some folks out there like myself who
use LabView for remote instrument control and data collection might also
be using Intuilink

As I stated in my OP there's no Intuilink issues when all 3 instruments
are powered up and on my 192.168.2.X network. However, I often don't need
to use all three simultaneously so why waste electricity. From a software
perspective I don't think Intuilink should choke just because either ARP
and/or RPC responses are not received from a particular device that is
powered off. The app should time-out and move on to whatever
instrument(s) are on-line and capable of responding over a TCP/IP
connection. Again, let me stress that this is an issue with the Windows
and Excel Intuilink toolbars; Those standalone remote screen and data
capture examples provided with the Intuilink package don't have this
problem and neither do the apps that I wrote in LabView. Sincerely,

John Wood (Code 5550) e-mail: wood@itd.nrl.navy.mil
Naval Research Laboratory
4555 Overlook Avenue, SW
Washington, DC 20375-5337