Hello, all. 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). 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? Thanks for your time and ocmment. Sincerely,
Hello, and thanks for the only response thus far. 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. Sincerely,