How To Discover Your Room Alert Monitor With A Packet Analyzer Program (Advanced Troubleshooting)

If all other methods for discovering your Room Alert Monitor have failed, one last step to try is using a packet analyzer program such as Wireshark. Typically, you’d take this step after you’ve attempted to discover the Room Alert by connecting it directly to a computer, but you can also use Wireshark while your Room Alert is connected to your regular network.

To find the IP address of your unit using Wireshark, follow the instructions below:

1. Have the MAC address of your Room Alert handy. This FAQ shows you where to look: Where To Find The MAC Address Of A Room Alert Monitor.

2. Open Wireshark. You may open it by navigating to Start→ Wireshark in Windows.

3. The Welcome to Wireshark window appears. In the Capture section, you’ll see a list of networks your computer is associated with.

4. Double-click the network that your Room Alert is on. In our example, we are choosing the network called Ethernet.

5. The Capturing from window appears with the Apply a display filter . . . field towards the top of the screen.

6. In that field, enter the following:

eth.addr==Your Room Alert’s MAC Address

Example:

eth.addr==1A:2B:3C:4D:5E:6F

You may use colons or hyphens as separators in the MAC address.

7. Hit the Enter key on your keyboard or select the blue button with the white arrow to apply your filter.

8. You’ll then see the network traffic to and from your Room Alert. If you don’t see any traffic at all, reboot the Room Alert by disconnecting it from power and then reconnecting it.

9. You may find your Room Alert’s IP address in the Source, Destination or Info column.

– This screenshot from Wireshark shows the Room Alert (on DHCP) first booting up on its regular network. You can see its IP address is 192.168.2.88, which shows up in several places in the capture.

– This screenshot from Wireshark shows the Room Alert (on DHCP) first booting up while it is connected directly to a computer. You can see its random 169.254.xxx.xxx IP address in the Info column.