Communication between two APIPA computers without DHCP Server

On the last Saturday Me and my friend are trying to connect two computers directly using a USB cable and start communication between these two computers without the help of any external DHCP server. As I mentioned in my previous post we cannot use ordinary USB cable to connect two computers directly. It may burn the USB port.

[ To know more about it please follow the link below.

http://www.corenetworkz.com/2009/10/can-i-connect-two-computers-using-usb.html ]

In this project we avoid using router or any other DHCP servers. As we are not using the Ethernet adapters we cannot set any static IP address. So without the presence of external DHCP server and static IP address our both computers will get APIPA from Windows Operating System.

[ To know more about APIPA please click on the link below.

http://www.corenetworkz.com/2008/02/how-to-resolve-issue-when-ip-getting-is.html ]

So the IP address our computers got was 169.254.X.X range. Fortunately the IP address gained by our computers were in the range 169.254.1.X and it started to communicate with each other.

It is sure that APIPA computers can communicate each other as their subnet mask is 255.255.0.0 (Class B address). So as the subnet rules says the network address of APIPA is 169.254.0.1 and the broadcast address is 169.254.255.255. Any address comes in between these range can communicate each other. Because it is a private IP address we cannot use APIPA to get Internet connection to our computers. For Local networks and Intranet APIPA is enough.


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7 comments:

Exipheas said...

The correct Network ID is 169.254.0.0 and the Broadcast ID is 169.254.255.255 the assignable addresses for this class B network are 169.254.0.1 to 169.254.255.254.

Siju George said...

Thank you Exipheas,

You are absolutely right. The network id of APIPA is 169.254.0.0

While writing the network id on my post ,actually what was in my mind is the first valid IP address in APIPA. The first IP address is 169.254.0.1

I understand my second mistake (broadcast address). I don't know why did I made such an error while typing the post. I will edit that error soon. Once again my thanks to pin point the mistakes I made.

Anonymous said...

Do you know if there is a way to determine the IP's of all connected stations?

Let's say I have 5 computers in a LAN and they assign themselves an IP by APIPA.
Now I can only access one machine (because the others are embedded systems), how can I find out the other IP addresses?

Thanks,
Alex

Siju George said...

@ Alex

APIPA is assigned by the OS it self and there is no external DHCP server works for it. So I don't think there is any way to find the APIPA ip address of other computers in the LAN without checking each system manually.

Anonymous said...

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