Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

They don't have a back-channel reset like the Agilent, and they only support a few simultaneous connections, so they will timeout on an idle connection and close it out.  This means that, if you have applications where you're only using the interface intermittently (i.e. not polling), you have to build in a keep-alive mechanism to exercise the connection.  For instance, in the titanium sublimation database I wrote, it will update the display on the HP 3488A multiplexer with the date and time when it's not sublimating to keep the connection open.

They also do not handle our network security scans well, and we had reliability problems until we isolated the subnet they were operating on from the scans.  ICS says they are aware of the problem but do not currently have the resources to harden their network stack (though they hope to do so in the future), so network management is the only current solution.

--

eric