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I need to connect two machines via cable and do some work with these once they are connected. Are there any .Net classes which would let me detect two machines connected via cable (when I say cable I do not mean computers on same network but machines which are physically connected)?

I did come across some links on stackoverflow but none seem to have been answered. Hence any links to previous relevant posts are welcome.

RamyaN
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  • did you mean Serial port connection by saying physically connected? – Orifjon Apr 14 '15 at 08:11
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    What type of cable do you planning to use? COM, LPT, USB, Ethernet? Answer strongly depends on it, and I'm sure if you narrow down your search with cable type you can easily find some samples. – Andrey Korneyev Apr 14 '15 at 08:12
  • It could be primarily ethernet connection or connecting to same LAN port. The use case is that, we would have two machines side by side and we want to establish connection between these two machines without having to connect to network and be able to possibly copy files or data between these two. Hope this makes it clearer. – RamyaN Apr 14 '15 at 08:28

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There isn't a .NET class that will just give you this but there are probably some techniques you could use, to varying degrees of success:

  1. If you have access to both machines as part of your process, set a pre-defined static IP address on each device, then if you make sure that only the Ethernet port is active on both devices just wait until you can ping your predefined static IP address and you know they're connected.

  2. Something like https://stackoverflow.com/a/12659133/1742551, running packet sniffing code on one machine to detect when activity is happening on the other end of the cable... not sure how you'd then tell what the IP address of the other machine is though and I guess you'd need this in order to do the work you describe.

  3. You could use the TcpListener class to listen for connections on a specific port number, then from the other machine scan all other available IPs on the same subnet as itself for a device which is listening on this port (assuming that you can ensure both machines are on the same subnet). Assuming this connection is the only connection available, and both devices have no static ip address set, Windows will autoconfigure the IP address due to the lack of DHCP server then they'll both be assigned 169.254.x.y ip addresses as part of the 255.255.0.0 subnet, so this should work.

  4. Probably some other option that I haven't thought of yet, but you get the point...

Community
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GoldieLocks
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