Technical data

100 Agilent Connectivity Guide
5 Connecting Instruments to LAN
Multiple NIC Cards If Agilent Connection Expert (see “Step 3:
Run Agilent Connection Expert” on page 102) does not discover
instruments because there are multiple NIC cards/interfaces in your PC
(for example, a notebook computer with a built-in wireless LAN as well
as a directly connected LAN). Windows Vista and Windows XP may be
broadcasting on the wrong NIC and/or AutoIP may be turned on for one
or more instruments.
Connection Expert sends a separate UDP broadcast to the broadcast
address of each NIC. This broadcast address is the network part of each
NIC's IP address with the subnet part set to all 1's. The PC network stack
uses the network part of the address to determine which NIC to route the
broadcast packet to. Additionally, a UDP broadcast of 255.255.255.255
is also sent. It is this address that will pick up AutoIP instruments whose
network addresses aren't consistent with the subnet they are connected
to. The problem is that Windows will only send the 255.255.255.255
packet to one NIC. That is the only NIC where AutoIP'd instruments
will be found.
If Connection Expert doesn't discover an AutoIP instrument that you
expect to find, temporarily disable network connections and force
AutoIP discovery on a particular LAN interface. Use the following
procedure:
1 Open the 'Network Connections' dialog from the Windows Control
Panel. You can also open this dialog from the Start > Run box by
opening 'ncpa.cpl'. See Figure 28 below.
Figure 28 Network Connections Dialog Box (Windows XP, details view)