Why do I get an error when I run an application on a Windows machine that is not connected to a network?

Note: Applies to NDDS 3.x, RTI Connext 4.x and above.

You can run a publisher and subscriber on the same node or on different nodes. However, even if you are only using one node, by default, RTI Connext looks for a network connection. The default discovery behavior is to look for peers using multicast, IPv4 loopback, or shared memory. A network stack must be present in order for multicast or loopback to work. 

Windows-based machines will not bring up a network stack if no network is detected. This will cause the default discovery process, as well as participant creation, to fail. 

To solve this problem, either: 

• Connect the computer to a network
• Change the discovery method to only use shared memory by setting the environment variable, NDDS_DISCOVERY_PEERS, to  shmem:// (use lowercase). For more information, see the online documentation (Infrastructure Module, Discovery QoS policy) or the RTI Connext Core Libraries and Utilities User's Manual (Discovery chapter).

Alternatively, the Microsoft Loopback adapter is a testing tool for a virtual network environment where network access is not available. For more details see http://support.microsoft.com/kb/839013 or search Microsoft Support for Looback Adapter.