I have two computers. One of them has a server running, the other has an application that communicates with that server. These computers are deployed to various sites. Sometimes these computers can be wired directly together, other times they will only be connected over a wireless connection I don't control. As an additional requirement, the server also needs to be able to access the internet using dhcp if a connection is available. The goal is to be able to set these computers up in an office, then deploy them to a site with almost no on-site configuration.
What can I do to ensure that the computer running the application can always (or as in as many cases as possible) can find the server and communicate with it (HTTP over port 80).
My thought is to setup the server with multiple IPs. It can access the internet using DHCP on one. The other will be set to a static IP. The application computers will be configured to know this static IP address ahead of time and make requests to it. However, in the tutorials that show how to accomplish it, I must enter my gateway and subnet mask. And won't these change depending on the network I join?
Please excuse me if I'm missing something exceedingly obvious or overlooking other factors. I know next to nothing about networking.
If there's a piece of hardware that can help, that's fine.
This is vista and xp.