Instrument Control (GPIB, Serial, VISA, IVI)

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Making a remote VISA call to PC on LAN requires Dial-up to be connected?

I have 3 PCs setup on a Lan. The one running Win2k is also set for Internet Connection Sharing, so it is acting as DHCP server. The one running Win98 is running a VISA server and a RDA server. The 3rd PC is running WinXP Home.
The problem is that neither the 2k or XP machine can connect to the VISA Server without taking a LONG time to get the VISA session (like over 5 min), unless I first connect up to the internet on that PC using dial-up networking. If the PC is dialed-up, it works fine.

Any ideas how to fix this?
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So, as another datapoint, if I disable Internet Connection Sharing and set up all PCs with static IP addresses, I can no longer connect to the remote VISA server at all, even if I am dialed-up.

Before I disabled ICS, I was able to connect and control my DAQ card through the RDA server, but with ICS disabled, even that will not work.
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Hey Glenn,

One of the first things that you need to verify is that you have the exact same version of NI-DAQ and VISA on all of the computers. The next thing you should check is to see if you can ping the other computers. If you can't ping them, then you need to check your network settings.

Other wise take a look at this document on RDA. It is very useful and has helped me a lot in the past.

http://zone.ni.com/devzone/conceptd.nsf/webmain/E74C1A78430F4397862568690075BF58?OpenDocument

I hope this helps out.

-Josh
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Josh,

Thanks for the tips.
All 3 PCs are running NI-VISA 3.0
I can ping all PCS (and share their drives, printers, see then in network neighborhood, etc)
RDA seems to be working pretty well, its NI-VISA that is causing the headaches.

Here is another thing I just noticed...
If I am not on-line and I try to edit a VI that uses a VISA icon in it (such as VISA Close), the VI won't open.
When I then went on-line, it opened.
(That said, the one I just tried while writing this won't open... oh wait, it just did, after about a minute.)

I just upgraded from LabVIEW 6 and 6.1 (both installed) to the full test development suite with LabVIEW 7, TestStand, LabWindow/CVI, etc.
I currently still have the old versions of LabVIEW installed, until I get
my old VI's converted to 7.


Any other ideas???

Thanks!!!

Glenn
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"and set up all PCs with static IP addresses"

The only guess that I can make about this is that maybe you only half-way did that. In Control Panel - Network Properties - etc., you tell Windows what IP address to use for its own network adapter, but this does not tell Windows what the IP addresses are of the other PCs on your LAN.

In Windows 2000 or XP, there is a file usually C:\WINNT\system32\drivers\etc\hosts

In Windows 98 it might be C:\Windows\hosts though I seem to recall it being hosts.txt for some reason.

If you list your entire LAN here then your PCs should be able to find each other.
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In case anyone comes across this post in the future because of a similar issue-

I fixed this by assigning a fixed IP address to all of the PCs, disabling ICS, and listing all PCs in the Hosts file of each PC.

Glenn
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