The suggestion by Tip & Ring is a very good idea and that is what I was going to do in the lab. If you put TAPIT on its own PC with two NICs you can run a crossover cable directly to the LAN port of the OS7100.

I would suggest putting the NICs in separate networks. For example... the customer's LAN is a 192.168.0.0 network. The NIC that connects to the LAN would be in that network. The other NIC would get a 10.0.0.0 network and the OS 7100 would get an IP in that network.

If you need remote access... you can setup IT on the PC running SMDR. Get remote access to that PC and then connect to the OS7100 for maintenance.

You can also find scripts available that can ping the OS7100 from the PC and send an e-mail if it fails to get replies for a specified time. This would alert you to a potential loose of SMDR connectivity.