(someone wrote)
I think this is little OT here, because the question is mostly
network oriented. However my nodes will be Linux embedded boxes and
some solutions could be very low-level, so I think many of you could
help me in some way.
I have N Ethernet hosts based on embedded Linux. Each one features
an Ethernet interface dedicated to the final user that could change
the IP address configuration. On that interface a Web server
responds. All the nodes will be configured on the same subnet and
conected to a switch.
Now I need to make an "internal" communication among those hosts.
With the work "internal" I mean the user should ignore the presence
of this communication and relevant details (it should not be
necessarily invisible to a traffic monitoring tools).
The old way would be to use ethernet broadcast, possibly with your
own ethertype. I believe that there is a process for assigning ethertype values, but usually not for small scale systems like this.
You can't broadcast TCP, but you can UDP. DHCP, for example does
that before it has an assigned IP address.
I think it should be possible with TCP multicast, but I don't
know how you get assigned a multicast address.
For example, when the user changes the IP address of host 1, the new
IP address shouldn't be configured in host 2 too and the internal communication between host 1 and 2 should continue without
interruption.
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