This week I was working with TrakHound’s MTConnect.NET library again, but all my test connections were failing.

I had been testing against the MTConnect Institute’s demo agent, which is now run by NIST. I opened it in my browser and got a 404 Not Found. So I went up one level and saw this…

Yep, the agent run by NIST is shut down due to the federal government shutdown.

Fortunately it’s pretty easy to download and install the C++ agent. There are even instructions for installing on Ubuntu or Raspberry Pi, and prebuilt Windows executables.