Perhaps I'm misunderstanding your question, but this doesn't sound like anything unusual. E.g., here's a standard ARP interaction, shown via 'tcpdump': 

0:80:c8:f8:4a:51 ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff 42: arp who-has 192.168.99.254 tell
+ 192.168.99.35
0:80:c8:f8:5c:73 0:80:c8:f8:4a:51 60: arp reply 192.168.99.254 is-at 0
+:80:c8:f8:5c:73

[download]

Note that the call goes out to ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff - that's the hardware broadcast address - and you get back a reply with the MAC and the IP, which should tell you that the machine is up (unless, of course, you have some reason to suspect somebody faking those.) At a higher level, you could just use 'ping' (since you already know the IP). Unless you really need that machine to send back text (neither ICMP nor UDP are all that useful in that situation), it seems like either of these approaches would take care of "finding" the machine you're looking for.

Both of these can be implemented in Perl, but I'm reluctant to start cranking code without feeling like I actually understand what you're trying to do.


--
"Language shapes the way we think, and determines what we can think about."
-- B. L. Whorf

In reply to Re: How Do I Do an IP Broadcast in Perl? by oko1
in thread How Do I Do an IP Broadcast in Perl? by HalNineThousand

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.