Hey, I have a piece of software that has a server and a client version. It is designed to work on a network set up for like a home or school. something with the 192.168.whatever.whatever. Well.... I need to write the code that would allow for the client to find the server. Here's the catch. I can't hardcode the server's ip into the client and I can't tell it to the client. I need the client to broadcast a general 'hello.......?' message to find the server. How would I do this? I was thinking that I would send a packet to the ip 192.168.1.255 since the ip range is only from 192.168.1.1-254(i'm pretty sure).

Any helpful Ideas?

oh, how would I find out the source ip from a packet?I have the client listening for a response to it's 'ping' and i need to know how to get the ip of the sender of the response so that this ip can be used at the server's ip.

Thanks!

Is there a fixed port that server listens? If so, you can try to connect that port -say 5000- of the IPs 192.168.0.0/16 sequentially. If there can be conflicts because of the usage of a commonly used port, a confirmation word can be used after connecting the destination host.

Also you can find the sender IP and other protocol header informations by using the raw sockets or tcpdump's libpcap library.