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Asked: 2026-05-27T08:23:47+00:00

I have trouble to configure my network to access my device with a friendly

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I have trouble to configure my network to access my device with a friendly name. Here is my situation:

   LAN
    ^
----¦----  USB/ETH   ------------------
¦  PC   ¦ ---------> ¦ Embedded device¦
---------            ------------------

What I’d like to do is using a friendly DNS name to access my device, for example opening a webrowser, typing “mydevice” and acces the web page of my device. I use dnsmasq as DNS/DHCP server.

It didn’t work because after configuring my USB network adapter, my PC always use the USB/ETH as default route and the outside world is not reachable (Under Linux and Windows).

Solution 1 : Removing default route from the DHCP server.

This worked fine under Linux but my Windows 7 doesn’t want to set the IP address and shows a very clear error message:

Your computer was not assigned an address from the network (by the
DHCP Server) for the Network Card with network address 0x001830000000.
The following error occurred: 0x79. Your computer will continue to try
and obtain an address on its own from the network address (DHCP)
server.

Solution 2: Changing the metric of the USB/ETH interface

I got this solution from there: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/894564

This worked fine under Windows however, I’d like to make things “automagic” and avoid the need to go into Windows configuration! On my Linux host, as the default route is now configured, I’m back to the first situation.

As the metric is computed locally I was wondering if it is really possible to change this value from the DHCP server (probably not!)? Do you have any suggestion to make this weird network configuration to work in any case with both operating systems? Or is it possible to “fake” a slow connection on my embedded device to force the operating system putting a higher metric?

Thanks for your suggestions!

EDIT 1

I’d like to avoid any manipulation from the PC …

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    If this were my problem to solve, I’d use different RFC 1918 address blocks for the two different networks: I’d use e.g 192.168.0.0/16 for the LAN and 10.0.0.0/8 for the device connected over the USB-mounted Ethernet device. (Yes, 16 million IPs are way more than it needs, but I prefer the 192.168.0.0/16 range for my own network. 10.0.0.0/8 never felt right.)

    ip route add 192.168.0.0/16 dev eth0
ip route add 10.0.0.0/8 dev <name of usb eth device> src 10.0.0.1
ip route add default via <router> dev eth0

    You’ll have to configure your device to have the corresponding address in 10.0.0.0/8 — not 10.0.0.1 — and make sure your device knows how to route to 10.0.0.0/8 over its interface too.

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