Hello,
We're working on a small appliance that has a linux/unix installed on it with our product. The challenge we are facing now is this. When we send out the device to a client, we would like to make it as easy as possible for them to setup.
The device needs an IP address so then the client can connect to the device via a browser on a given port to setup the configuration options.
The problem we forsee is the different environments and technical abilities our clients may have.
We've thought of these solutions and none of them sound very appealing to us.
... Client gets the device and plugs it into the network... and then...
Uses nmap to do a full network scan and try to figure out which device is our appliance... (seems to be too much work for our purposes) or.... We give the device a preset IP address (hoping that it won't conflict with other systems, and that it will match their network) -- (this is probably not feasible, are they using 192.168 or 10.10, or some other private address) or.... We tell the client to connect to the device via serial and configure it with a valid ip. (This seems to be the most reasonable option but the client may not have the knowledge to do this) or... We have our device "phone home" when they plug it in and we'll tell the client the ip configuration that it got. (this is too dependant on the ability of the machine to phone home, firewalls, blocked ports etc etc) or... We tell the client to plug it in, the device will get a DHCP address and they can just ask their network admin to look it up on the DHCP host table. (This may be impractical on a big company where a network admin is not easily available for this) or...
We've thought of a few other ideas but we're just trying to narrow it down to a couple of good solutions.
We don't like any of these ideas, and we think there may be a more elegant solution out there that we can implement. I'd greatly appreciate any input or ideas in the matter.
Thanks a lot for any feedback you can give me!
Oscar