I would like to know what is a good approach when developing an application for an embedded device that has it's IP address assigned by DHCP. We only have the Ethernet link and a circuit breaker for power, no other reset buttons are available.
We currently wait for a number of DHCP timeouts and if we don't get configured, we failover to a static IP address. The only way to get DHCP to assign an IP address after this is to drop the link. The other problem is that all the devices failover to the same static IP address and we can have up to 12 devices on a managed switch.
Is that a good approach? What if DHCP services appear later after the DHCP timeouts have occurred? Can we detect something that could tell us to renegotiate the link without dropping the link?
Thanks,