During my work, I regularly connect to various computers and embedded devices that are accessible via an Ethernet connection. These could now be connected directly - like the development computer - to the company network…

… or you can create your own “lab network” for your devices, which is only accessible from your own laptop and over which you have full control. Advantages can be:

• Overview of the connected devices and their IP addresses.
• No exposure of the connected devices to the company network (improvement of security)
• If only Wifi is available at the development computer, the embedded devices can still be reached easily and wired.

In larger companies, access to the internal company network may also be heavily regulated, so that only unlocked devices can be used at all. With an own small laboratory network on a second network interface, this problem can be elegantly circumvented.