Device Finder

[PatrickRitchie]

Looking for Feedback

In the last commit I added the MTConnect.NET-DeviceFinder library. This library is used to search a network for MTConnect Devices and return the IP address, Port, Device Name, etc. in order to identify it.

Nuget : https://www.nuget.org/packages/MTConnect.NET-DeviceFinder

The code is ported over from a previous repo I had made several years ago called MTConnect-Sniffer.

The basic functionality is to Ping the addresses, test the Ports, and then send MTConnect Probe requests. Each step should narrow down the search as, for example, it doesn't need to test the Port on addresses that failed a Ping.

I have used this (or similar code) in a few applications to discover MTConnect devices automatically but I did run into a few issues at times. The main issue was with larger networks on a subnet other than 255.255.255.0. I think the best way to use it would be to narrow the search to an expected address range as that helps prevent searching thousands of nodes.

I would be curious to see how this works on different sized networks and if anyone is able to test that then it would be much appreciated.

Thanks,
-Patrick