RPi 3b to PC via ethernet peer-to-peer without internet sharing

Question

All the material I find on the internet, is about sharing PC's internet connection with Rpi using the ethernet cable, and setting RPi static address etc.

However, My RPi 3B already has it's own wifi connection to the Internet. I don't need to share any internet connection between my windows 10 PC (also has it's own WiFi connection).

All I want is to be able to communicate internally between the two machines using the ethernet cable, while they're both connected to their own internet.

Is it possible, to configure the eth0 independently without affecting the wlan0 connection? I'm not sure that if I go ahead with a static IP config, will the RPi lose the usual wifi connection to internet?

Can you please give me some pointers on how to configure such a pure internal p-2-p connection between PC and RPi3b?

Answer 1

Ahh ok, I just did it :)

Instead of editing the /etc/dhcpcd.conf for setting the static IP, I edited the /etc/network/interfaces file, to set a static IP for the eth0 alone.

Now my PC can access the RPi with the static IP I see in ifconfig for eth0, without disturbing each other wifi internet connectivity.

Pure peer-to-peer connection achieved. Didn't know it was this easy!

Answer 2

@seamus The entries I added to the end of this file are:

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

auto eth0
iface eth0 inet static
address 169.254.1.10
netmask 255.255.0.0

However, later I commented these lines out, and just installed another utility called 'fping'. That simply made my work easier. And all I had to do in Windows was to "Enable" ping response, with a long series of steps detailed here.