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You might want to take a look into the Bootstrap Protocol which is standartized in RFC951 and quite common for such kind of tasks (at least in my business). This protocol basically uses the UDP broadcast address 255.255.255.255 on port 64 ( I guess ) to request any compatible device. The device will respond on the port 65 of the broadcaster. The broadcaster is then able to specify the IP-Address and some more parameters of the target device.

You might want to take a look at the Transport.lib as well. It has an example of UDP Multicast and some nice features such as encryption, compression, timestamps and payload size (you can use more than 1500 byte payloads on windows and linux).

Fabiola de la Cureva: "I hide the configuration file in a hidden directory with a strange name. I do that to avoid the 'users with initiative' problem." [i.e., debugging why the system is broken only to discover that someone has been fingerpoking the setup.] That little phrase "users with initiative"... so much more tactful than the terms I've heard developers use over the years. Not that I would ever say that about any of *my* users. :-)

If only we had a "ping" function