E-Console (ECON) Program Utility release notes

ECON 03.07 – November 2010

Known problems:

• with certain newer device firmware versions, the download command will fail after the progress indicator indicates it is complete (100%). The device never displays the command prompt after the download.
• when reconnecting after a session has been interrupted with F4, the session fails.

ECON 04.09 – July 2011

This is the first public release of the enhanced version of ECON. It contains scripting features to allow fairly easy update of a network with several (or many) Afar devices. Where previous versions of ECON always prompted the user to select which radio to connect to, this version starts up with a prompt. Normally, the user wil type a CONNECT command.

For more information, see the manual. The ZIP file includes the manual in PDF format.

ECON 04.10 – August 2011

Problems corrected:

• Some newer PCs (typically those preloaded with Windows 64-bit System 7) have network interface cards that will consolidate TCP packets received from the ethernet into large packets as they are received into the PC. ECON would discard these oversize packets with a “Bad packet length” message. These packets will now be discarded silently. (ECON does not care about TCP packets. The TCP protocol module receives them by a different path.)

ECON 04.11 – October 2011

New Feature:

• New command “diagnose” automatically provides most recommended troubleshooting output to a file that can be sent to AFAR.

ECON 04.12 – March 2012

New Feature:

• At initial display of available radios, say “Use CONNECT command …”. Some users were confused because with the old ECON they had to type the radio index number.

• Diagnose command was truncating the output from remote radios, particularly when they were behind slow links.
• “diagnose all” now also prints a separator line before the output from each new radio in order to make it easier to locate each section in a long output file.

Better handling of problems when there is insuffient memory at startup.
This version was built of Fedora 14, which is very similar to Ubunto 10.04 LTS

In download command, correct determination of whether a file name has an extension.

Brings the Linux build to same features and bugfixes as the Windows build.

Discard oversized (TCP) packets cleanly in both Windows and Linux builds.
The Linux binary is built on Fedora 22 (similar to RHEL 6).

[ECON for LINUX only] When downloading to multiple radios using ether the Econ command “download all” or “connect all” (or “connect selected” etc) the process would often hang as the session on one radio was ending in preparation for going to the next radio. Such a hung process could not be easily killed with Crtl/C or a function key. (It COULD be killed with Cntrl/Z followed by a shell command “kill %%”).