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Here's my tuppence. Get an indication from your IT dept when thy expect the issue to be resolved then get your project manager to bill the time against IT's budget. Add to your project plan the time they indicated and add a note that the project delivery date will be be delayed by at least that amount of time. Keep doing that if/when their indicated time expires until they resolve the issue. If you have weekly project meetings, make sure it is in the minutes and get an action on IT to resolve the issue and require status updates from IT so it never drops off the agenda. Ensure the IT issue is elevated to a high project risk category. Then. Download the VISA executable installer from "http://download.ni.com/evaluation/labview/ekit/other/downloader/" and tell your project manager you *may* have a temporary, sub-optimal solution which you are investigating for this particular package but that you fully expect continuing issues that may not have similar solutions even if you are successful this time, which is not guaranteed..

That was the PXIe-4844, an optical sensor interrogator. It wasn't just for temperature -- the gratings (microscopic cuts) can measure strain too. It's useful for taking lots of measurements across a long distance with just a single cable (although it was more like ~15 sensors per fiber, not 100), in an intrinsically safe environment, and/or an electrically noisy environment (since the fiber is not affected by noise). $20k was the price of a typical interrogator ~10 years ago. PXIe-4844 was obsoleted because NI exited the market. Other manufacturers are still in it; performance has gone up and price has gone down since then.