Instruments not connecting on first attempt (GBG)

Schedulers
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I have a problem that happens with GBG, but I’m not sure if it’s a GBG problem or a networking problem.

I have a collection of equipment connected via ethernet. Some directly, and some serial-to-ethernet through a Moxa unit. Whenever the computer restarts GBG is unable to connect to the instruments on the first attempt. To make matters worse, if I don’t manually connect to each instrument before I run a process, the whole process crashes during initialization when it fails to connect to an instrument. Once they’ve connected successfully at least once, they’ll be fine until the next computer restart.

Anyone know any networking tricks or system configurations I could look at to identify the cause of these connection issues?

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Are all instruments not connecting automatically when you start GBG up, or just some of them?

Do any of the instrument drivers require a GBG remote client?

Do you have any firewalls set up on your network?

Maybe more experienced GBG people can comment more, but I have only seen connection issues with instruments that have their own computer and software, such as liquid handlers. Even then, it is not a persistent, repeatable connection issue.

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I second all of these. In addition, it helps when your Moxa is using a static IP.

Definitely look into the firewalls.

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It’s possible that due to the way how your connection is established that after a reboot of your PC, your instruments still think a connection is still there. Then when GBG tries to connect with it again, the instrument throws an initialization error saying something is already connected to it. You may need to do something as simple as have a script run a disconnect on those instruments before it attempts to reconnect. A lot of it is also dependent on how the instrument’s API handle connections, so some instruments are simple to connect to but other may have issues if a connection is lost and the instrument doesn’t know it so it throws an error when a command is sent from a new connection. Hard to tell without know your setup and trying stuff out.

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Thanks for all the replies, everyone! I’ll give some of these things a try when I’m back in the office Monday.

I believe the Moxas are set up with static IP addresses. I have a few instruments connected by GBG Remote Client, but I have not had issues connecting with these specifically after restart. I haven’t made a list of the specific equipment that have issues, but I know that a couple that are connected via ethernet (PF400 arm and ADAM modules) have this issue, so firewall seems like it’d make some sense here.

@ehung, I’ve only really used scripting for setting variables and using system commands (file moving, etc). Is there a programmer’s guide that Biosero publishes that would give me some of the syntax I would need to interact with instruments?

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This is odd, what happens if you restart GBG ? Do you have to repeat the process? Which instruments are we talking about? There might be some devices that require you to explicitly add a ‘connect’ or ‘initialize’ command somewhere in the start up procedures. Have you pinpoint if this issue is specific to 1 instrument, or multiple?