Use of USB to Ethernet Adapter to Find cRIO Systems

[TailOfGon]

Hi all,

I am trying to connect to a NI cRIO-9066 from my laptop using USB-to-Ethernet Adapter.  But I have one problem with it; Find Systems VI does not show any results whereas the direct connection through the laptop's ethernet port does.  I would like the USB-to-Ethernet Adapter connection to support this feature as well.  I would like to know if anyone has done this and hopefully has solution to this.

Here is my setup. I purchased USB-to-Ethernet Adapter from RadioShack. I connect the adapter to one of the USB ports on my laptop. The adapter has the female Ethernet port on the other end. I directly connect cRIO and the adapter using a crossover ethernet cable. What's to note is that ethernet connection is working.  I can specify IP address of cRIO then I can communicate with crio in the same setup. However, Find Systems VI cannot find any system.  LabVIEW 2015 is what I use.

Instead of using the adapter, if I use direct connection via the ethernet port of the laptop, Find Systems VI works just fine. 

Any help or suggestion is appreciated.

Thank you in advance.

[nathand]

First thing I'd check is that you don't have Windows Firewall or other security enabled on the USB-Ethernet adapter. Quite possibly it's enabled by default for any new network connection.

If you disable the onboard ethernet, so that the USB-Ethernet adapter is the only enabled connection, does that make it work?

Failing that, what's the output of ipconfig (run this in a command window)? If you have both the internal and USB ethernet adapters configured for the same range of IP addresses, you might have issues.

[TailOfGon]

Thank you nathand for your quick response.  I am not aware of how to disable the Firewall specifically for the adapter. Any link or document on how to do it is really appreciated.  I have added my application (exe) to communicate through Firewall from Control Panel but that didn't help.

[nathand]

It was easy to do in Windows XP... not sure which version you're running but here are instructions for Windows 7:

https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windows/en-US/2eeda4bc-9fc3-4ff3-811f-f69133d5466f/how-d...

[Sam_Sharp]

If you're using a cRIO-9066, why don't you just use the onboard USB device port (the B-type connector)? When you plug that into your PC, it will enumerate as a USB-to-ethernet device (on a specific subnet) and you'll immediately be able to see it in MAX etc.

[TailOfGon]

Sam_Sharp,

That was my original plan. But I recently started seeing the behavior where the connection gets lost in the middle of communication using Type-B Port. Thinking that USB Type-B port may be not good, I decided to try using the USB-to-Ethernet Adapter.  The result is, the connection is no longer losing.  But the problem is now that Find Systems VI does not work.  This function is critical for my application otherwise I have to ask customers to go into MAX and let them to find out the IP address.

[Sam_Sharp]

Ah ok, that makes sense then.

As others have said - could be a windows firewall issue (disable it on that particular adapter). The other thing it could be is that windows sometimes takes a long time to create a peer-to-peer connection and assign IP addresses etc. - have you checked that you're getting a valid 169.X.X.X IP address (e.g. in connection status).

Finally - some ethernet ports don't autonegiotiate when you use a patch versus a crossover cable. If the usb-to-ethernet device doesn't autonegiotiate, then you'll need to use a crossover cable.

[TailOfGon · Accepted solution]

After all, my conclusion to this problem was the model of USB Ethernet Adapter I was using was not good.  

Gigaware's USB to Ethernet Adapter ( from Radio Shack) did not work with Find Systems VI on my environment even though it is still able to connect to CRIO if I know the IP Address. I even got the second one but the result was the same.  The solution for me was to use another model from INSIGNIA, that is NS-PU98505. This one is cheaper but worked with Find Systems VI.  

I don't know what is behind the different behavior, but the problem solved on my end for now.

Thank you all for all the advice and insights. Kudos to all!