On Wed, 2006-06-28 at 00:28 -0600, Nate Duehr wrote:
> On Jun 26, 2006, at 3:52 PM, David VanHorn wrote:
> 
> > My printer does this.  It does regular DHCP, then the front end  
> > software
> > finds it, presumably with a broadcast to an oddball port or an "are  
> > you my
> > mommy" scan.
> 
> Probably "mommy" just sends out a broadcast packet that all  
> "children" know to respond to in a certain way.  If your LAN were a  
> class A (e.g. 10.0.0.0/8) it'd take "mommy" a very long time to find  
> her "children".  :-)

I don't see why. The size of the network doesn't really matter. If you
send out a broadcast packet that the "children" are designed to respond
to the size of the network doesn't matter. The number of children will
impact the response time of the "mommy" though.

In my housemon project 
(http://repatch.dyndns.org:8383/pic_stuff/housemon) 
all the "children" send out their packets as broadcast packets. This way
they don't care how many "mommies" are present! :) They don't even worry
about having a mommy (poor things...)

Now, if you're talking about an IP scan (something like connect to a
certain port, write something, see if you get the correct response back)
that can take a VERY long time (depending on your timeout).

TTYL

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