How to communicate with a device that has an assigned “0.0.0.0” IP address?

I have an piece of industrial equipment that runs on a pretty basic OS called VxWorks. I usually communicate with the system for troubleshooting purposes by setting my IPv4 IP to the same range as the local IP and then running diagnostic software.

A few weeks ago I found that for some odd reason the local IP addreess of the system set itself to 0.0.0.0. Now I want to get into diagnostics to change it but my PC will not permit setting an IP beginning in 0.

Is there any other way to communicate with a device that has a local IP of 0.0.0.0 using a windows PC.

There is no way to reset the device to factory default settings without shipping it back to the manufacturer.

0.0.0.0 is not a valid IP address. RFC1700 (a) states that 0.0.0.0/8 (0.anything.anything.anything) is reserved as a source address only.

Normally you'll see systems and applications bind ports to 0.0.0.0 which means the port is accessible from any interface.

I'm not familiar with VxWrks but I would assume that there is a way to specify a local IP for interfacing with other computer devices.

WindRiver has a variety of manuals on how to configure the IP setup.

You can trick your PC into thinking that device has a real IP address. But you need the physical address (also known as the MAC address), the thingy with 6 two-hexa-digits fields. You do that by adding it to your arp resolution table. In Windows, open a cmd terminal and use arp.

arp -s <IP address> <physical address>

Of course, you need an IP address unique and in your network. Otherwise, the stack is going to reroute somewhere else. If you get to this point, you should be able to access the device. The network infrastructure will route according to the physical address.

In Linux is pretty much the same. Open a terminal, use arp.

It may not work!! Some devices answer only to their own IP. But I'm guessing it's not your case.