What's the best way to locate devices on a network?

Question

I'm building software for a company that sells hardware devices. They want the software to be able to locate all devices on the network without restricting either of their IPs.

What's the best way to do this? I'm thinking the hardware could subscribe to a "known" multicast address, have the software broadcast to it and the hardware would reply. The devices and software would reside on the same LAN so I'm not worried about multicast being blocked. I'm just worried that I'll discover that the "known" address is already in use in the future. It isn't possible for me to change this protocol once I've got devices in the wild. Please advise.

Answer 1

Universal Plug and Play, Bonjour or other Zero configuration networking techniques.

Answer 2

You could look into the various methods of constructing zero configuration networking.