RPi3 direct ethernet connection with a laptop

Hi,

I’m having issues getting my RPi3 ethernet interface connected with a Windows10 laptop (ethernet interface 169.254.255.255). The RPi3 is connected to the internet via WiFi but I also need the ethernet connection for directly sending/receiving data from an offline ethernet device.

My ethernet interface configuration file (resin-eth0):

[connection]
id=resin-eth0
type=ethernet
interface-name=eth0

[ipv4]
never-default=true
dns-search=
method=auto

[ipv6]
addr-gen-mode=stable-privacy
dns-search=
method=auto

Trying to manually bring the connection up (nmcli connection up resin-eth0) results in “Error: Connection activation failed: IP configuration could not be reserved (no available address, timeout, etc.)”.

However, when I connect the RPi3 to a router in my LAN, the eth0 works as intended and is assigned an IP address.

Why doesn’t a direct connection to a laptop work? What am I missing here?

I presume that neither your laptop nor RPi are acting as a DHCP server and that your router does. This means you’re relying on APIPA to sort out a set of IP addresses. I’m not sure of whether both your laptop and the Pi will be APIPA’ing correctly, have you tried assigning static network details?

Oops, or providing a DHCP server for that direct connection.