My guess also goes in the direction of autodiscovery via DNS. This method is called "zeroconf", and has been branded "Rendezvous" by Apple and then rebranded by Apple as "Bonjour". CPAN has Net::Rendezvous, which implements a convenient method of autodiscovery on the client side.

In reply to Re: server 'autodiscovery' on a LAN by Corion
in thread server 'autodiscovery' on a LAN by schweini

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