A customer is experiencing some anomalies with their 4 slot Ethernet cradles and MC7094s relative to IP attainment. We’ve communicated that the MAC address and IP address are assigned to each slot of the cradle and that as devices move from one cradle slot to another they automatically inherit the IP address from the slot. The customer claims that IP stays with the device. IP collision may be occurring here and could explain why devices sporadically lose connection to the server. In the interest of better educating the customer, I checked the User manual and Integrator manual for additional info, but it doesn't seem to cover this level of detail required here. Has anyone come across a paper on how this whole process works?
In addition, for diagnostics purposes, how can one go about getting the MAC address for a particular cradle slot?
Thanks in advance.
4 Replies
Everything said in these posts have been correct, however there is a mechanism which would allow the customer to change the operation. DHCP has "options" which are optional information to be contained within the DHCP messages. One option is Option 61 - Client Identifier. A customer can choose to assign a UNIQUE option 61 value to every MC70 in their site, and then the DHCP server would be using this client identifier instead of the MAC address in order to determine how to assign IP addresses. I mention this for 2 reasons: 1) It gives your customer another option, although it would mean assigning a different registry key for every MC70, which could be a pain, and 2) There is a chance that your customer has actually used this option already, which would by why they are saying that the cradle is not acting the way they expect. -Dave
Thank you for your feedback David and Robert... For eveyone's awareness there was a GRIP 4810 created for a handy network utility to retrieve cradle-slot MAC addr.
Instead of a utility to get the MAC addreses how about just listing them on the label.
Peter As you said the four slot cradle has unique MAC addresses on each slot and the device will use those MAC addreses depending on what slot they are placed in. If you take one device and place in each of the slots you will get a different MAC address and thus a different IP from the DHCP server. You can see this under Start >settings > connections tab > Wi-Fi and selecting the USB/Ethernet series adapter. I attached a symscript file that you could run and it will tell you the MAC of each slot as you plce the device in cradle