IP Discovery in Windows

Question

What are some strategies for a client to discover a service?

For example, we have a client that wants to connect to a service (assuming they are on same subnet on the same network), what's a good way to discover that a service is running and then therefore the client will attempt to connect to it?

Would we want the client to broadcast often and wait for the service to respond? Or would we have the service broadcast often and have the client listen?

I would think we would want the service to broadcast itself and have the client listen.

What's standard practice for this?

The service for example will be something like a music player that plays music when a client remote controls to it via wifi/network. Think of iTunes Remote for iPhone controlling the iTunes player on a PC/MAC.

Can you be more clear about the kind of services you want to have discovered? — John Saunders, Mar 04 '12 at 09:20
The service for example will be something like a music player that plays music when a client remote controls it via wifi/network. — LB., Mar 05 '12 at 00:58
And why doesn't the client already know where the service is? — John Saunders, Mar 05 '12 at 00:59
Ok. I may have been imposing my experience with web service discovery on your situation. In the case of web services, there is generally a transparent form of load balancing, so discovery isn't needed for that purpose. — John Saunders, Mar 05 '12 at 17:40
It's essentially a remote app on a mobile device controlling some aspect of a service running on a PC. — LB., Mar 05 '12 at 17:42

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Mar 03 '12 at 16:35

There are two parts to your question:

How to locate the service?
How to discover if the service is running?

The normal way to tell if a service is running is to attempt to connect to it.

So how to locate it? Normally you'd want to avoid broadcasting. Typical approaches are:

Configure the name of the server on the client.
Add a custom DHCP option; the client can query the address of your server from the DHCP server.

If you do broadcast, it's normal for the client to send the query. This gives you a single broadcast each time a new client joins the network, as opposed to continuous broadcasts (and a delay at the client) if the server is advertising its location.

IP Discovery in Windows

1 Answers1