IPSetup Protocol or MAC address range?

[lfmorrison]

Hello all,

I am working on a device which internally uses Ethernet to communicate between several components, as well as providing an external Ethernet port on the same network to plug in a PC with a web browser to control/monitor the device.

One of the internal components is an SB72EX, and another is an embedded PC running Linux. There will never be more than one Netburner-manufactured component connected up to the internal network. The Linux PC is also running a DHCP server, to automatically configure the external web browsing PC. I need the SB72EX to always have a fixed internal IP address, however we cannot trust the user to remember to manually configure it with the appropriate IP address. So instead, I am looking into making the Linux PC automatically configure the SB72EX's IP address.

I am considering two possible strategies to accomplish this:
1) Configure the DHCP server to assign IP addresses from two different pools, depending on the client's MAC address (or some other identifiable feature).
2) Write a program for the Linux PC that uses the same protocol as Netburner's IPSetup utility to automatically probe for the SB72EX and configure its IP address appropriately.

Option (1) seems to be the most promising, because it wouldn't require writing new software and thus there would be less chance of creating new bugs. As well, every SB72EX already comes out of the box pre-configured to query a DHCP server. But in order for it to be viable I would need to know the range of every possible MAC address that an SB72EX could ever potentially have, so that the DHCP server will be able to tell the difference between the SB72EX and any other potential client. (I cannot customize it to look for only the unique MAC address of the SB72EX that's actually installed in the device for the same reason that I cannot use manually configured IP addresses in the first place: we must assume that the user would forget to perform that step during configuration.)

Option (2) certainly seems to be equally possible, but without any documentation of the protocol used by the IPSetup utility to perform the task, it's impractical.

[edit] I located an application note in these forums entitled "The Configuration Record Packet" which would probably provide enough information to get option (2) going. That being said, I think I'd still prefer to stick with option (1) if possible. So my questions still stand. [/edit]

Does anybody here have an opinion of which option would work best? Or a suggestion of an alternative approach I haven't considered? If option 1 is best, where can I find information about the range of MAC addresses that identify a Netburner-manufactured device? If option 2 is best, where can I find more information about the IPSetup utility's protocol?

Regards,
Luke

[Chris Ruff]

1.IPSetup source code is in \nburn\pctools\ipsetup
2.Netburner's MAC addresses all start with 00-03-f4

Chris

[lfmorrison]

Excellent! Exactly what I needed to know.
Thanks,
Luke