I'm writing a manufacturing inventory system in Java, and - for the life of me - I can't figure out what it is I need to search for, or how to probe a network for a particular server type.

For the client installer, I'm trying to get it to probe the network for any SQL servers, but I have no idea where to even start with this.

If there's any thought about it, I'm not in school, and this isn't a homework help request.

Indienick,

TBH, the user will just have to know what they are connecting to. In today's world figuring this out for them could be quite hazardous to your user's career (and yours by extension) if you resort to TCP connection tests.

That would look malicious to an IDS and amounts to a port scan. If they have a zealous and competent security staff at the place, they'll be at your user's desk within a couple of minutes.

You could try listening for UDP broadcasts, but security conscious dbas will limit udp to the local database server subnet. You really don't want to broadcast your db server's heartbeat (or whatever) to the entire network. It's just not a good thing to do.

IMHO this is probably the last thing you should worry about and could do more harm than good.

-Viz

Have a look at java.net package classes and look for Java networking librairies(for utilities such as ping, etc.)
For example when you telnet a mysql server : telnet somehost.com 3306, there is a mysql response string which you can read. The string contains the server name and version.

Thanks for the responses!

I'll definitely post my results when I get the chance to test it out; I figured I would have to use the java.net package, but I didn't know what on Earth I would do with it.