IP Reporter

IP Reporter is a small Windows utility published by Bitmain that lets you discover an Antminer's network address without scanning the whole subnet. You run the listener on a PC connected to the same network, then press a physical button on the miner's control board; the unit broadcasts its current IP address back to the waiting application. It is the fastest way to locate a freshly powered or recently reset miner whose address you do not yet know — the small but real gap between plugging a machine in and reaching its web UI for the first time.

Why the gap exists

Antminers ship configured for DHCP: on boot, the control board asks your router for an address and accepts whatever lease it is handed. Nothing on the machine displays that address — there is no screen, and the status LEDs say nothing about networking — so the information exists only in your router's lease table and inside the miner itself. IP Reporter closes the loop from the miner's side: rather than you hunting for the machine, the machine announces itself. The same mechanism helps when a unit's address has changed after a power cut, when a factory reset has wiped a static configuration, or when a miner has silently dropped off your monitoring dashboard and you need to confirm it is still alive on the wire.

How to use it

Download IP Reporter from Bitmain's support site and run it on a Windows PC connected to the same LAN and subnet as the miner — running it as administrator helps it open the listening socket past the Windows firewall. Click Start so the tool is listening before you press anything on the miner. Then press and hold the IP Report button on the control board for about five seconds until the unit responds (typically with a beep or LED flash); the tool's window then lists the miner's IP and MAC address. Enter that IP in a browser, log into the web UI, and you are in business. Two habits prevent most frustration: make sure PC and miner are on the same broadcast domain — the announcement will not cross into a different subnet or VLAN — and if nothing appears, check that the Windows firewall is not silently eating the incoming packet.

Alternatives when the button is out of reach

IP Reporter is Windows-only, and walking to a machine to hold a button does not scale past a handful of units. Cross-platform alternatives work from the network side: check your router's DHCP lease table for hostnames beginning with the manufacturer's prefix, or scan your miner subnet for hosts answering on the miner's API port (4028) with a tool like nmap. Fleet-scale operators skip discovery entirely by using DHCP reservations, so each MAC address always receives the same IP — a practice worth adopting even at home, since it makes every future troubleshooting session start from a known address instead of a hunt.

On the bench

For repair work, IP Reporter is often the first triage step on an intake machine: if the button press yields an announcement, the control board boots and its network stack works, which immediately narrows where the fault can live before you ever open the kernel log. For a full walkthrough with screenshots, see our guide on using the Bitmain IP Reporter.