slow serial port map

[karmic]

We have just bought citrix metaframe XP to the tune of $150,000 and i'm responsible for the install and configuration. Everything worked like a charm with the exception of one issue. The serial port mapping for com 3 slows down our little networks.

First up, we are running over lucent/orinoco wavelan
wireless (silver cards). 11 MBit network and Maxrad antennas. No problems with signal strength in the field at all.

We use serial port 3 on a touchscreen computer for data
aquisition and that needs to be mapped to the server. It
works like a charm until the distance between our access
point and the server gets beyond the 200 foot mark. The
signal strength is still very high but there seems to be
a lag in the serial port mapping over the wireless.

It is the mapping causing this. When we unhook the serial cable to com3 the software runs fine but with no data.


We've already
- increased the baud rate of the serial port.
- increased the separation of the antennas with a little
bit of success.


If anybody has any ideas, please let me know.

Thank you...

 

[CitrixEngineer]

Have you tried reducing the client colour resolution - taking it down from 24-bit colour to 256 colour should help.

What make and model of touch screen are you using?

CE

 

[karmic]

I appreciate the response...

I've already tried the color resolution even down to 16 colors (which is all we really need) and the touchscreens we are using are the 12.1" from computer dynamics Inc (cdi) in the states. It's thier own idiot creation.
The hardware has been ruled out as I've taken the touchscreen out of the loop to replace it with a regular workstation with the same results.

I've been fighting with our team of programmers that our software is to blame, not citrix or the wireless. Every tweak I do to 2000 server, citrix or to the wireless network doesn't make any difference. But, management wants everything else ruled out to be sure.

Any more ideas or input would be appreciated.

Thanks.

 

[Pritch5000]

Surely the touchscreen has no affect on the citrix session? Is it not a monitor with a mouse overlay? That would make it purely a local device. Do you even need to capture the com port at all? Could that even be the problem? Who knows? I'll try and see! We use touchscreens for our software.
Pritch.

 

[Pritch5000]

ok, wrong answer for the question! With all this talk of touchscreens...

Are you saying that the com device is 200feet away from the com port? What is the com device? Does it work fat client? can you try an alternative device? can you try alternative PC hardware?
pritch.

 

[karmic]

Actually Pritch2000, the problem is solved now. It turned out to be the comm driver library in our software causing all of our problems.

Our equipment is rented to oil rigs half way across canada. And the scenario went like this...

Our touchscreen is hard wired to the access point via 10base2 cable in our wireless network. The server sits usually 150 to 200 feet away in another shack. We cannot get around this unless we bury a 200 foot serial cable to run straight to the server.
We use com port 3 on the touchscreen to accept data from our data aquisition boxes and this port has to be mapped to the server via citrix. The mapping would work right, but the data was sent twice from the touchscreen to the server really bogging down the network.
All the hardware works fine and the driver library has been updated solving our problem.
Citrix is running tickety boo and everybody is happy...

thanks for your time...

 

[karmic]

Here's another thought for you Pritch2000, do you have any ideas about tcp/ip to serial??? I can do serial to tcp but it's harder the other way around.

If you want the scenario, it's for a different data aquisition system we're looking at:

basically taking the same data off the same touchscreen on com3, and sending it to the server via tcp/ip. We can do this but getting the data back to serial is the tricky part. We've done it with ECS boxes and it works like a charm (but each set of boxes costs $1200 and we'd need 150 of them for our 150 "mini networks&quot. Most 3rd party software is flaky and a pain to work with at best and too expensive (we are currently over budget).

If you have any ideas with VB scripts or some other program, i'd appreciate it...

Thanks alot.

 

[karmic]

Sorry for getting your ID wrong, didn't read it right.

 

[Pritch5000]

I suspect Ares, that you're implementation is somewhat more advanced than ours.
We use serial ports for a variety of card readers and touchscreens.
Our system reads a membership card, we have a entry system software that reads the details throws up a picture of the member and then fire a turnstyle by sending a print job containing a single char to a control unit. The control unit has bespoke circuitry that reads the print job and signals the right turnstyle.
If this is of any help, let me know, but I doubt it.
pritch.