I tried today to figure out a simple way to give users of our new netmca (
Turned out there is nothing like an easy way to do that!
There are some utilities which can be used to ping the entire subnet; then list the arp cache, locate the known MAC address and see its IP. But these are far from something one would want to ask customers to deal with, long lists, necessity to search etc. , heck, it will generate more calls to me than if I do it for them every time.
In an attempt to solve it I spent 10 minutes adding RARP reply to our device Ethernet related stuff - so it would reply to an ARP inquiry #3 by sending its IP address (it only has one); and then spent perhaps 3 hours googling, moogling, you name it, searching for some piece of code to do that at the wintel side. Even rebooted the wintel laptop to ubuntu to try it out from there (thought arp -r or something would just work), oh no. No way. Spent perhaps half an hour of moogling for linux rarp, same thing.
How on Earth is that possible?! I can understand how many things are retarded as one would expect them to be on a x86 based thing, but this is too simple even for the x86 world.
Any ideas? I have not faced the issue in real life yet (users tend to have internet) but this is bound to happen and I am looking for some solution.
Dimiter
------------------------------------------------------ Dimiter Popoff Transgalactic Instruments
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