How to Configure and Use Remote NI-VISA

On the server machine (the one to which the hardware is connected), you must install Remote NI-VISA Server. This installation option may not exist in all NI-VISA distributions. By default, the server is disabled and access from any other computer is disallowed. Use the NI-VISA configuration utility (MAX on Windows, visaconf on UNIX) and make sure the server is enabled. You must also specify each address or address range of the computer(s) you wish to allow access. An address can be either in dot notation (x.x.x.x) or the network machine name; an address range can only be in dot notation (x.x.x.*).

On the client machine, no configuration is necessary. The VISA resource string contains the server machine name and the original VISA resource string on the server: "visa://hostname/VISA resource string". The hostname can be represented as either an IP address (dot-notation) or network machine name.

If you want to search for all resources on a specific server, you can pass "visa://hostname/?*" to viFindRsrc(). On Windows, you can use the Remote Servers section of MAX to configure NI-VISA to access certain servers by default. In this case, using "?*" will cause viFindRsrc() to query all configured servers as well as the local machine. If you want to limit the query to the local machine only, regardless of whether it has been configured to access any remote servers, pass "/?*" as the expression to viFindRsrc().

Remote NI-VISA supports the complete functionality of all attributes, events, and operations for all supported hardware interface types.