The Configuration / Detection functionality of the API supports loading in certain pre-defined plugins that can be used to help listen for responses from the devices and/or to help provide information about the PC's available network cards (interfaces) and their IP addresses. In most cases, using a plugin is not necessary.
There are currently three possible settings for the plugin available on Windows systems. This is not currently implemented for Linux systems.
Plugin options:
None - No plugin used.
System - The Windows API is used to provide information about the network interfaces on the PC. Using this plugin does not affect how queries are sent out or how responses are received.
WinPcap - This plugin loads and utilizes the WinPcap library, if installed and available on the PC. This plugin is used to provide information about the network interfaces on the PC, as well as to "sniff" for the replies that ETH32 devices send in response to our queries. Using this plugin does not affect how queries are sent out.
Only one of the above plugins may be active at one time, and whichever plugin is active will apply to your entire application process (although it only affects the Configuration and Detection functionality). For example, if you load the WinPcap plugin and choose a network interface to sniff on, your application can still utilize the Discover IP functionality in the same way as always, but internally, the API will be using WinPcap to sniff for responses.
If your application has already loaded one plugin and is going to load another one instead, you must first make sure that you free any list of network interfaces that you have retrieved using the loaded plugin. Since plugins are loaded for the entire process and don't have a "handle," the API does not attempt to do this for you, and you must make sure you do it yourself.