How many concurrent connections can be made on the EtherLite?

Solution:

While most of our EtherLite products support up to 6 concurrent "host" connections, those connections do not have to be from hosts running the same operating system. They can be a mixture of hosts running any of our supported operating systems.

Keep in mind that we are being careful to differentiate between sharing PORTS and sharing UNITS. While UNITS can be shared, PORTS may not!

If more than one host attempts to open one of the serial ports at the same time, the open will succeed for the first host there. The other hosts will simply see an open failure (no lost data or damage, just a failed open attempt). When sharing a single EtherLite between multiple hosts, the administrator must simply make sure not to configure more than one host to try and use the same port unless carefully managed between the hosts, based on knowledge of each other.

The only requirements for a host to successfully make a connection to an EtherLite are:

• There must be bootp/DHCP services on the (sub)net where the EtherLite exists, and it does NOT have to be one of the hosts running our driver.
• The host must have our driver loaded and have TCP/IP access to the EtherLite.
• The host must NOT be the one which exceeds the "concurrent host connection" limit for the EtherLite (See NOTES below).

If a host attempts to make a connection to an EtherLite which is out of available connections, that connection will simply fail. The driver will assume the unit is "offline", failing, or powered off, and automatically start retrying until the connection is established. If the connection takes minutes without succeeding, an error will be passed back to the application.