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First time posted on serverfault. We have a bunch of windows CE devices that hate our DHCP server (likely a bug) but lets ignore that.

Say we can't use DHCP at all. But we have devices that may connect one of two Gateways wirelessly, say one gateway has ip XXX.Y0.1.1 the other has XXX.Y1.1.1 both with a subnetmask 255.255.0.0.

Is there any possible way to set a windows CE machine to have a static IP address, and hardcode in that it would try first, XXX.Y0.1.1 if that doesn't work then XXX.Y1.1.1.

Jonathan Stiansen
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I don't know if Windows CE is somewhat different (it shouldn't), but in any Windows system you can assign multiple static IP addresses and gateways to a NIC:

IP settings

Massimo
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  • Thanks a bunch! I assume it just goes down from top to bottom, any idea what the machine would do on the network to see if the gateway is available? – Jonathan Stiansen Sep 15 '16 at 20:16
  • This is determined by the gateway metric. It can be left on "automatic" to let the system choose the best one, or it can be manually configured to specify a preferred order. In both cases, the computer will quickly find that one gateway answers its packets while the other one doesn't, so it will anyway only use the one which actually works. – Massimo Sep 15 '16 at 20:29
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It is very likely that your problem with DHCP is a symptom of a poorly configured network.

The two possible gateway IP addresses implies that you have multiple routes to upstream networks. The consequence of not also implementing Spanning Tree Protocol is that you will have packets routing in loops and have broadcast storms on your network.

With broadcast storms, DHCP will not work reliably.

Michael Shaw
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  • The Spanning Tree Protocol is used to avoid *ethernet* loops, not *routing* loops; IP routing loops only lead to discarded packets after their TTL expires. – Massimo Sep 20 '16 at 21:06
  • That's a good hypothesis. In our case we are pretty confident that the DHCP issue is caused by a bug in Windows CE as well as it's configuration. Many devices are on the network (windows, macs, servers, etc) that the DHCP works flawlessly for. – Jonathan Stiansen Sep 22 '16 at 12:54