I'm working on an automated test setup for some products our company makes, and part of that setup includes communicating via TCP/IP with an NHR4700 resistive load bank. This thing has been the cause of the vast majority of the issues we have experienced with getting this test setup together. The TL;DR is that I can ping the device and even its specific port using nmap, so I know it is there, but I cannot open its socket connection in NI-MAX. And we have had the device working for MONTHS without any major issue using the socket and SCPI (as opposed to the daily issues when we had it initialized as an intr0 VISA resource and the NHR-provided LabVIEW library). After weeks of support over several different instances across several years, NHR's support has basically given us a shrug and a "I dunno," when we bring up the issues.
Here is the incredibly nitty-gritty details of our setup:
PC: Windows 7 with 2 Network Adapters
Adapter 1 (used to connect PC to intranet):
- IP Address Type: Static
- IPv4 Address: 10.8.0.93
- Subnet Mask: 255.255.255.0
- Default Gateway: 10.8.0.1
- Interface Metric: 2
Adapter 2 (Used to connect to hardware test devices):
- IP Address Type: Static
- IPv4 Address: 192.168.0.1
- Subnet Mask: 255.255.255.0
- Default Gateway: intentionally unset
- Interface Metric: 1
- IPv4 Checksum Offload: disabled
As per the instructions for the NHR4700, there is no firewall enabled on Adapter 2, User Account Controls are disabled, and the following command was added to the Route Table:
route -p ADD 255.255.255.255 192.168.0.1 METRIC 1
Adapter 2 then connects to a router, which itself connects to a power supply and a load. The power supply is configured for IP 192.168.0.2, and the load's remote communication IP is 192.168.0.14. We have never had an issue communicating with the power supply, only the load. The load's IP address uses different sockets for different kinds of communication. 5024 I believe is used for normal inst0 type control, while port 5025 is the one used for socket control. And again, until recently, we have been able to control it fine.
So, all that being said, I can successfully ping 192.168.0.14 from the command line. I can open nmap and run the command "nmap -p 5025 192.168.0.14" and get a response back. But in NI-MAX, when I try to validate the connection (TCPIP0::192.168.0.14::5025::SOCKET), I get VISA error code 0xBFFF0011 "Insufficient location information or the device or resource is not present in the system."
I'm at an absolute loss. I feel convinced that the load itself is somehow to blame for this, but it just doesn't make sense to me how I can do simple communication with it through the terminal yet cannot open its VISA connection in NI-MAX. Any help at all would be greatly appreciated.
EDIT: Fixed the NI-MAX error code.