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Local vs. Network Diagnostics
Sometimes customers ask why they can't run
MicroScope over a network. Most of the reasons for this are
related to OS independence, so this article should be read
after finishing The Importance of OS Independence.
One reason though is that hardware problems
of any consequence will normally interfere with network communications.
If you can even talk to another system over the network, you
have just checked out about 95% of what you can check out
over a network. Any testing more thorough than that will require
local access.
Not being able to do in-depth hardware testing
over a network is just an extreme case of the truism that
you can't do accurate hardware testing under a general-purpose
OS such as Windows, DOS or Linux, because these programs are
designed to run the hardware in the background, insulated
from the user and applications.
The bootable operating system that comes
with MicroScope bypasses all of that OS interference, but
it also bypasses the network configuration, protocols, NIC
drivers and other parameters that are unique to each networked
system. It's easy to forget that Windows or Linux on that
system originally had to be configured for proper network
operation, and that had to be done at the system itself.
It is technically possible to make the MicroScope
operating system network-capable, but it would have to be
set up on each machine being diagnosed, just as the resident
OS had to be set up. Then, the system would have to be re-configured
for the resident OS after MicroScope had done its job in pin
pointing the hardware error. As a practical matter, nobody
is going to do that when they can just boot up MicroScope
and find the problem in a minute or two.
Of course, many competing products avoid
the reconfiguration problem by running under Windows, and
these diagnostics can theoretically be executed over a network
using Windows' own network configuration. The price they pay
is that they cannot directly access the hardware and get the
same accurate information available to MicroScope, and if
used over a network they are even further removed from every
piece of hardware, with the possible exception of the network
card.
The short answer is that it is not possible
to get accurate hardware diagnostic results over a network.
There is just no substitute for sitting down at the ailing
machine, and running the best diagnostic program available.
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