Subject: Re: Configuring devices without consoles

From: Stuart Cheshire <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 3 Oct 2000 16:33:25 -0700

>We build industrial instrumentation which has an ethernet port.  The 
>device may or may not have a console.  In the commercial world, I suppose 
>this would apply to a network printer.  I want to be able to configure 
>that device, possibly with a static IP address, possibly for DHCP without 
>needing a console.  In other words I want to configure it over the 
>ethernet.  The trouble is that if it is unconfigured or configured 
>incorrectly, I cant talk to it.

This is a significant part of the zeroconf goals. Bootstrapping may seem 
to be an unimportant trivial area to a lot of people, but when you have a 
misconfigured device in your hands that you can't communicate with, it 
can be an incredibly frustrating time-consuming problem.

The Apple AirPort base station is very similar to the kinds of devices 
you describe. It has no console, and no serial port to attach a terminal. 
Our plan is that it will *always* have a link-local IPv4 address, and 
will always advertise itself using the chosen service discovery protocol, 
so that no matter how badly you mess up its static configuration, you can 
always discover it and talk to it locally to correct the configuration 
mistakes.

Stuart Cheshire <[email-masked]>
 * Wizard Without Portfolio, Apple Computer
 * Chairman, IETF ZEROCONF
 * www.stuartcheshire.org