I found that IDE 2.3.7 does randomly list the network ports.
Any solution please ?
Regards
pert
March 18, 2026, 1:28pm
2
I moved your topic to an appropriate forum category @Elesoft .
In the future, when creating a topic please take some time to pick the forum category that best suits the subject of your topic. There is an "About the _____ category " topic at the top of each category that explains its purpose.
This is an important part of responsible forum usage, as explained in the "How to get the best out of this forum " guide . The guide contains a lot of other useful information. Please read it.
Thanks in advance for your cooperation.
Hi @Elesoft . Are you using Windows? A community member performed an investigation into the unreliable discovery of network ports for Windows users, and has submitted a proposed fix:
main ← koenvelle:fix/skip-virtual-interfaces-windows
opened 12:47PM - 18 Mar 26 UTC
On Windows with multiple network interfaces (WSL Hyper-V, Docker Desktop, VMware… , VPN adapters), mdns-discovery queries all interfaces in parallel. Each query opens a UDP socket bound to 0.0.0.0:5353. When the target Arduino device sends its mDNS response, Windows delivers the incoming multicast packet to only one of the competing sockets — whichever the OS chooses internally. If a virtual adapter's socket wins, the physical NIC's socket never sees the packet and discovery silently returns nothing, even though the board is actively responding on the wire.
This was confirmed by network capture: the Arduino responded within 15 ms of the query, but ReadFromUDP was never called on the physical interface's socket. Disabling the WSL adapter (vEthernet) immediately fixed discovery.
Fix: filter out virtual adapters in availableInterfaces() so they are never queried:
- Skip interfaces named 'vEthernet*' (Hyper-V: WSL, Docker Desktop)
- Skip interfaces named 'VMnet*' (VMware)
- Skip interfaces with no routable unicast address (link-local only / 169.254.x.x) — catches Linux/macOS virtual bridges (docker0, virbr0) that have a MAC but no reachable LAN subnet
Interfaces that don't match any filter condition are queried exactly as before —
no behaviour change on machines with only physical adapters.
Fixes #87
Fixes #61
The also provided details about their findings here:
opened 08:39PM - 18 Dec 25 UTC
topic: code
type: imperfection
### Describe the problem
I've just noted that the Arduino IDE (2.3.7) is no lon… ger able to find my devices.
There are two versions of mdns-discover.exe in the tools folder, 1.0.9 and 1.0.12,
Arduino IDE seems to choose the later.
That one seems to stuck and not return anything for MDNS-Discovery:
1.0.12:
<img width="912" height="258" alt="Image" src="https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/c9127c25-e909-42e4-87d8-b0e6235656f0" />
No progress after even 15 minutes.
Arduino IDE:
<img width="245" height="133" alt="Image" src="https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/2230b752-c4cf-4989-93e1-a850749f6481" />
1.0.9:
<img width="1047" height="778" alt="Image" src="https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/8c616b77-4dc6-450b-b856-50c7e8afff0c" />
Not a second until each device is listed.
So, I proceeded to drop the 1.0.12 - restarted the Arduino IDE and it's able to find my devices again.
<img width="244" height="464" alt="Image" src="https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/240eeb0c-d169-42b5-95f8-a3b1ae4cb77f" />
### To reproduce
see above
### Expected behavior
see above
### mdns-discovery version
1.0.12
### Operating system
Windows
### Operating system version
25H2
### Additional context
#### Related
- https://forum.arduino.cc/t/network-ports-are-gone-in-ide-2-x/1415698
### Issue checklist
- [x] I searched for previous reports in [the issue tracker](https://github.com/arduino/mdns-discovery/issues?q=)
- [x] I verified the problem still occurs when using the latest version
- [x] My report contains all necessary details
For now, it would only be possible to obtain this particular fix by installing a tester version of the tool that discovers the network ports. If you are interested in giving it a try as a beta tester, I can provide instructions for doing so.