Netedit feature requests

[JohnB]

A few years ago, I asked about getting a counter display added to Netedit so it would show a total count of all the Ecom cards that responded to its network scan. It would be even better if it had a breakdown by device (124 H0-Ecom100's responded, 54 H4-ECOMs responded, etc.), along with a total count of devices. Is this under consideration to be added to Netedit?

Also, when a network scan is done, it is very common for a scan to return several devices in the list that show 0.0.0.0 for the IP address with an Unknown module type, even though the hexadecimal MAC address is returned. Sometimes I have to scan the network several times to get a device to show up in the list, even though I know it is on the network. If I recall correctly, the explanation I got for some of this is that Netedit has a fixed time interval where it waits for responses from the devices on the network. I think that I asked about future editions of Netedit where you could change the wait time interval on a network scan to get more accurate responses from the devices (at the expense of a longer network scan time, I assume). Is this still on the development list, and if so, do you have an estimated time for when this feature would be available?

Thanks

John

[BobO]

NetEdit is generally something we develop on an as-needed basis. Do-more is our primary emphasis right now, so NetEdit feature developments are not a priority. It isn't that we don't feel it to be important, it's simply that Host is a small company working on big things, and resource limitations dictate that some are lower priority.

It wouldn't be particularly difficult to tune the timeouts, and large installations may be exposing some issues. The partial reads (0.0.0.0) may be due to the node read timeout being too short.

The missing devices could be a couple of things. To discover devices, we send out a special broadcast packet. Every Host device that sees it delays for the sum of the last two bytes of his MAC address in milliseconds, and then answers. This can create a pretty big burst in large systems like you are describing. I would think that most things could handle it, but it is possible that routers or switches could be getting momentarily overwhelmed. Might also be overrunning the query buffers in NetEdit. I'll check to see what the max is. I'm thinking 500, but it might be smaller.

We have 50 or more devices on Host's office network at any time, but I doubt we've actively tested more than that. We're happy to work with you on these issues. Please contact support@hosteng.com. Mention BobO sent you and reference this forum post.

[JohnB]

Thanks for your reply on this. I understand why this is not a priority for you. The unknown device issue for us is more of an inconvenience at times, and it is not always repeatable. I have tried scanning the network several times since I made the original post, and it has not returned any unknown devices since then. I can tell, however that the network scan usually returns a different number of devices each time I scan the network by hitting page down several times and then getting a final count of devices on the last page. That is one of the reasons I asked about a device total count. Normally, if I don't see an address that I know should be there, if I keep scanning the network, the address I need will eventually show up. I haven't make a tech support request on this because it is an intermittent problem, and I know how hard those can be to resolve.

John