Chromatography Forum

Hi all,

wonder if any of you can throw some light on this problem, we have an Agilent 1100 and we've connected it to a pc via a lan connection. The pc has chromeleon software and we also have an ELSD and CAD connected (via various boxes etc!). The chromeleon software on our Agilent panel will only run in "demo" mode. We've been trying to get hold of a dionex software engineer (for the chromeleon) for 5 days now but they simply keep either not phoning back or similar so we are getting rather cranky and under pressure to get this sorted (we only have 2 systems!). Any suggestions how to get it connected via a LAN connection and off demo mode or is this not possible?

lynz x

Hi,
The reason why you drop into demo mode is (always?) because Chromeleon cannot connect to the instrument(s), and the error message is (should be) clearly stated in the log view when checking the communication from Chromeleon.

Are you sure you have correct IP address and contact with the Agilent instruments? In other words can you ping them from the windows cmd window?

It is hard find out the MAC and IP address on older Agilent/HP 1100 instruments, and even more complicated to set a fixed IP address, since that is not shown on the console. On newer 1100 instruments you are supposed to be able to set fixed IP address as easy as on newer networked Agilent GC.

You can set IP address dynamically with the BootP utility at start up. It is not trivial to understand how the BootP works. The key issue is to understand/find the MAC address that are sent from the Agilent 1100 at power up andin BootP set it up the table so that a certain MAC address gets an certain IP address. To check that BootP has really given an IP address, you have to ping the instruments afterwards with the address and see if the instrument answers. Teh Agilent BootP program is easier to use than (older) Dionex BootP.

Hopefully you have a separate dedicated network com card for the instrument communication, complenting the one reserved for common network use. Can you get help from the IT department to set up the network com card correctly and to check/set the Agilent instrument IP addresses?

Dionex should certainly be able to support this!

(Edited afterwards)

This all means something to my colleague so she says thankyou! lol! We'll give BootP another go as that sounds like it could very well be very helpful! It certainly sounds like what we had thought was the issue with the system and pc not speaking to each other we're just a little fuzzy on the technical side! We are only a little company so don't have an IT department or any support at all and have been in escence abandoned with the task of setting this up (with no IT experience!). We're getting there but its been a laborious process...

Many thanks,
Lynz )

On the 1100 series LAN card there's a set of switches they can be set in a certain configuration to give a fixed IP address...call Agilent they can tell you which switches should be set to "off" and which ones should be set to the "on" position giving you a fixed IP address
But before you call Agilent try these...

1-off
2-off
3-off
4-off
5-on
6-on
7-off
8-off

setting the switches to these positions should give you the IP address as ( 192.168.254.11 ) for the card...

is this a set up that was working in the past and suddenly stopped working?
if yes then normally the settings that were there should not have disappeared out of thin air.
first ping in the CMD as said earlier to see that the PC is seeing the instrument LAN card
if you have a dynamic setting, remember that after a while of not communicating the LAN card on the UV 1100 will shut. so you need to turn on and off the UV

another possibility that you have is that the service is turned off
go to the services in windows, see that the dionex bootp server is turn on and goes on automatically

all the explanations on how to get the connection going is in the help
Connecting Devices to the Chromeleon Server PC
TCP/IP Control: Installing the BootP Server
screen by looking for bootp server

you need also to take into consideration the hardware failures
1. the LAN card on the PC- newer cards are very fast cards, the agilent card cannot cope with that, you will need to set the PC card to work slower
2. the cable, if it is connected directly, PC to UV, it must be a cross LAN cable, or 2 LAN via HUB

Does really bootP need for to connect Agilent 1100 with cm7.2 SR1?