服务发现（Win Server，Android客户端）

Question

I've got a largely working pair of server (Windows) and client (Android) applications that will need to run on a LAN they will pretty much know nothing about until fired up. About the only assumptions I can make are WIFI and DHCP allocated IP addresses.

I will need a mechanism for the clients to find the server. I've got an entire-alphabet-soup of choices but I've not had to do this before, so I'm asking you, the fine people of StackOverflow, for advice.

NSD (Network Service Discovery) seems to be the preferred method on Android but seems non-existent on Windows. Is there an inter-operable Windows protocol?

I get the impression that DNS-SD wouldn't work for this without configuring the DNS before my server showed up on it.

As all I need to know is the IP of the server, it's very tempting to just make my own multicast group and have the server announce itself way. Is there a reason not to go with this approach?

Answer 1

Too much fuss.

The client can determine its own ip. And knows that the ip of the server is about the same. Only the last byte group will be different.

Just make a loop and try to connect a socket with ip addresses 'around' it's own ip address.

You will have the server ip within seconds. Set a small socket timeout value first.

Answer 2

Android Service Discovery is compatible with Bonjour.

Using Mono.Zeroconf to make the Bonjour calls. At the current time, the code in Mono.Zeroconf works but the distributed binaries do not . I had to recompile them but it works.