The current SBC2 network configuration is a right pain in the arse - it would be much more helpful if the board could boot with a fixed IP address.

In my case I am on a restricted net where only mac registered computers running windows can get DHCP access. I eventually resorted to building a private net, running a DHCP server to get access to the board.

Please consider this change!

You can set up the SBC to use a static IP.

If it is set up for DHCP and it can't get a DHCP Address, then it will assign itself a link-local address that you can use to access it. In this case, you need to use Bonjour and/or Avahi to discover the IP Address. This is detailed in the product manual.

We chose to go for zero-configuration networking over a pre-assigned static IP.

-Patrick

I have the SBC running on a static IP. It was just my experience of getting there was that it would have been <much> easier and quicker if it had come with an option for getting a static IP in the first place.

On my net, which is out of my control, DHCP is locked to MAC addresses and the self assigned address can never be found because the switches will not route there so it was impossible to reach it.

When I built my own net without DHCP the device did not appear to self assign an address and the avahi / bonjour method did not find the device (I waited for the device to boot and probed all possible address with nmap).

My solution was to build a local net with a DHCP server only capable of setting one address and to be honest it was a bit of a faff.

On another point the web interface doesn't appear to allow the setting of a proxy which means that if you are behind a firewall the web interface can't do software installation...

The software update issue is definitely something that we'll be looking into - this is especially an issue for people connecting their Phidgets directly to a laptop ethernet port. Probably we'll add the ability to upload/install packages manually - adding a proxy option would also be a good idea.

As for the networking - this is a hard problem. For the majority of users, the link-local address works fine on networks without DHCP. At the simplest, it's probably easiest to get this working by attaching the SBC directly to your PCs ethernet and just set up a static IP.

I don't like just setting up a static IP because:
1. This will probably have be on a different subnet, so users need to much with their network settings.
2. There is the possibility of a conflict.
3. We would have to disable zero-conf link-local addresses, which are valuable for many users.

Zero-conf with link-local addresses is specifically designed to solve this problem.

-Patrick