AW: Finding devices with dynamic IP addresses

hi!

I need a way for any Windows PC on the subnet to locate the devices
without prior knowledge of their IP address.  I'm hoping to find a

peer-to->peer solution that doesn't involve a third party (DNS) server.


IMO the most elegant way to do this is using zeroconf networking.
it uses multicast DNS and service announcement/browsers.

see http://developer.apple.com/networking/bonjour/index.html

apple's implementation is released under the apache license v2.

if you know your device's hostname, this is all you need.=20
after installing the mDNS client library on your dev machine it will be
able to resolve that hostname (eg. ping mydevice.local)

otherwise, you will have to set up a service announcement (like
_telnet._tcp) and browse for your device (the dns-sd utility does that).

We're using zeroconf networking on a Virtex2-Pro FPGA (70MHz PPC405) and
it works great. I really recommend it to you.

greetings,
arvid staub