Chromatography Forum

Afternoon,

We have multiple versions of Chemstation running on multiple platforms of computers from Windows 2000 to XP. About a month ago a second network card was added to many of the PCs and we joined our lab network. Chemstation now opens VERY slow and some times not at all. If we unplug the network cable, Chemstation works as well as before. We have the NIC priority set to look for the Agilent first, but still no better. When I asked the Agilent rep, I was told they do not support dual NIC cards. Any one have a good solution or ideas?

Thank you,

If it's for Agilent GC or GC/MS you can plug your network into the HP network switch that comes with the system. You now have to give the GC, MS and Chemstation (PC) "static" IPs from your network server and manually enter these IPs into each instrument. You will have to enter in your network's gateway domain etc. as well into the instruments and your computer. This does work and it's fairly fast. One word of caution: we experienced problems when our network server would crash, then the PC and instruments could not communicate with each other and they would stop acquiring data. The work-around was that we would unplug the network ethernet cable from the HP switch when we were running samples over night. The instruments would still communicate with each other with no interference from the network if it were to fail.

However, I don't think this works for Agilent LCs as I believe they are hardwired to have IPs starting as 10.0.1.XXX or similar (I'm not positive about this though) and I'm sure your network doesn't use IPs like this. As far as I know the LC systems have to use dual cards to be on an external network, but I have never tried it on an LC. I plan on trying later though as I want all our data systems on our Internal Lab Net. Currently we use flash drives to transfer raw data and process it on the network later.

If you have LCs then I would suggest contacting one of the service reps directly that comes to service your instruments. They will sometimes provide you with more/better information than the call center as Agilent used to supply/support dual network cards in the past and the reps may be able to provide some guidance based on past experiences.

It should work, we have a recent 1260-LC that has been connected to our company server (via dual card)since its initial installation, works fine and fast. I did not install it myself so i cannot give a step-by-step protocole, but if you ask some precise question i should be able to find the info.
Max

Sounds like Bootp is struggling to tie the GC to the PC. Chack the subnetting so the NICs only see the things they're supposed to.