How does a robot determine its IP address?

Products

• DX Unified Infrastructure Management (Nimsoft / UIM)

Issue/Introduction

How does a robot determine its IP address?

Environment

UIM 8.x, 9.x and 20.x

Resolution

The robot (on all platforms) uses a specific C library call known as GetHostByName(). 

This relies largely on DNS resolution - so it is expected that a given IP address for a robot should resolve to the hostname of that robot, and vice versa - the hostname should resolve back to the same IP address. 

This can be mitigated to some extent by setting the following settings in robot.cfg but it is not 100% reliable: 

strict_ip_binding = yes 
local_ip_validation = no 

In many cases this will force the robot to use the designated IP without checking DNS, but in some cases it is not sufficient.