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I am builing an embedded device with ethernet network connectivity which will being sold to business (industrial) customers.

For inital setup the customer needs to adjust network settings as

  • IP address (IPv4), e.g. 192.168.1.123
  • DNS server, e.g. 192.168.1.1
  • Subnet-Mask, e.g. 255.255.255.0

Since the customers are in industrial environments we cannot rely on existing dhcp servers. So the customer needs

  • to configure his PC/laptop to a predefined ip address
  • make the network settings of the embedded system
  • to reconfigure his PC/laptop back to the company network settings.

Unfortunately many companies do not allow this for users and this requires too much network knowledge. I need a little utility to set network settings of the embedded device via UDP.

The utility should

  • run on windows 7 to 10
  • have a graphical user interface OR a command line interface to manually enter network configuration parapeters
  • should detect similar devices on the IP subnet and list them
  • allow to set the network configuration via UDP
  • be a standalone .exe program and run without installation

Where can i find such a (free, open source) utilitity?

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  • You say you don't want DHCP, but you're trying to reinvent it.
    – domen
    Commented Sep 23, 2016 at 13:33
  • Good point. But DHCP works without user interaction but I want to let the user enter all settings manually. I'll edit the question to be more clear in that point,
    – WeSee
    Commented Sep 23, 2016 at 14:02
  • So choose a DHCP server that has user friendly interface and fits your other criteria. When running, yes DHCPd won't require interaction, but it has to be configured, and this is probably what you want (would be a bit weird to have one person monitoring connections 24/7 and inputting IPs).
    – domen
    Commented Sep 23, 2016 at 14:09
  • The utility i am looking for is just used for the inital setup. So user interaction is no problem. And DHCP protcol may not work in customer networks due to existing DHCP servers. Network setup utilities are quite common when setting up network devices and i don't want to write one but look for existing to get a jump start.
    – WeSee
    Commented Sep 24, 2016 at 9:23

1 Answer 1

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A two part answer:

  1. Many corporate networks do not allow any un-managed devices to connect to them and also lock the users from changing the network adaptors settings so recommend that configuration be carried out using a plug in USB network adaptor.
  2. Write a little script in python to prompt the user for the settings that are required and to send them down via UDP, all of the tools that you need are in the standard libraries, and then convert it to a standalone executable with either py2exe or pyinstaller.
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  • 1
    Thanks, for 1. I fully agree. For 2. This is exactely what I am looking for. A free software that has two parts: a Windws client .exe and an UDP server for Linux e.g. Ubuntu.
    – WeSee
    Commented Sep 25, 2016 at 18:30

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