TB150701A

Recovering the address in early BAC-5051E

routers
Revision A

BAC-5051E routers manufactured before 29 June 2015 do not have the feature to recover an unknown
IP address in the router. There are are two methods you can use to discover it. One involves the unlabeled
LED and the other requires using Wireshark, a free program from www.wireshark.org.

Using the LED

When the router powers up, its unlabeled, bottom LED will blink the router's IP address and subnet mask in a
code. To use it, make sure you have pen and paper handy.
An IP Address and a subnet mask consist of four fields each, with the maximum value for a field being 255.
For instance, for an address of 192.168.1.252, the "192" is the first field, the “168” is the second and so on. For
each digit in a field, the router will blink this LED, then pause three seconds, then blink a count for the next
digit. It then pauses ten seconds between fields. A value of 0 for a field is indicated with a short “blip” that is
half the duration of a “blink”.
The sequence for an IP address of 192.168.1.252 and a subnet mask of 255.255.255.0 is:
a. Blink once, pause three seconds
b. Blink nine times, pause three seconds
c. Blink twice, pause ten seconds (the first field is 192)
d. Blink once, pause three seconds
e. Blink six times, pause three seconds
f. Blink eight times, pause ten seconds (the second field is 168)
g. Blink once, pause ten seconds (the third field is 1)
h. Blink twice, pause three seconds
i. Blink five times, pause three seconds
j. Blink twice, pause ten seconds (the last field is 252, so the IP address is 192.168.1.252)
k. Blink twice, pause three seconds
l. Blink five times, pause three seconds
m. Blink five times, pause ten seconds (first field of subnet mask is 255)
n. Note: Steps k-m are repeated for the second and third fields of the subnet mask.
o. Blip once (the last field is 0, so the subnet mask is 255.255.255.0)

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 Recovering the address in early BAC-5051E routers

Using Wireshark
Wireshark is a free network diagnostic tools available from www.wireshark.org.
When the router first powers up, one of the first things it checks is to see if some other device is using its IP
address. To do so, it broadcasts a “gratuitous ARP” message. You can see this messge in Wireshark and use it
to determine routers IP address.
1. Connect an Ethernet cable directly between your computer and the router, or connect them together on
the same Ethernet switch. It does not matter whether the computer's IP address is in the same subnet as
the router’s.
2. Before powering or resetting the router, open Wireshark.
3. On the upper menu bar, click Capture and then select Interfaces.
4. A dialog opens with a list of NICs and other computer network connections. Click only on the one that
matches your computer’s Ethernet NIC, usually the “Local Area Connection”.
5. Click Start and then power the router.
6. Count to ten and then click on Wireshark’s Capture menu and select Stop.
7. In Wireshark’s upper pane is a list of messages. Scroll until you see one in the Info field that says
“Gratuitous ARP".
8. Chances are that the first one you see is from the router because Ethernet devices don’t send random
gratuitous ARPS messages. If you look in this message’s Source field, the first part of this field should say
“KmcContr”.
9. The IP address shown in the Info field is the router’s IP address, since it is looking for itself. The
following example is for a router configured as 10.200.3.3.

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