Cool. Thanks again frog.
Great advice. Shoulda done this before getting so specific. I am not done read this TCP/IP book i got but a quick question;
Instead of using MAC, could i just query the network's DNS server with my computer name?
Well you said that you will be using it on a WLAN mostly which is not much different from something a regular LAN.
Using a fixed IP address is by far the easiest, very often sys admins tend to specify a DHCP pool from a certain starting point to an endpoint , any addresses not in that range will never be in use or are used for specific services etc.
But I understand that this isn't fancy enough
Since you are on the same LAN and we we wont have to bothered with things like NAT and other network horrors there is also no real reason to use a reverse connection , you can in this case flip the model and use the clients as servers.
Having them open a specific port and fetch the data yourself, this way they dont depend on a server on the network thus less things to go wrong.
Another idea might be to use mere force, in the realm of computing ~250 or tenfolds are nothing.
It might be a little noisy but why not have the client attempt to connect to the entire range of addresses in the network.
Say the client is on 192.168.100.173 and the server is on .058.
Just let the client attempt a connection to say port 32112 on the entire range from 0-254.
Within milliseconds it will hit the server and a connection is established.
Perhaps using things like broadcast or reverse DNS might be interesting protocols to investigate.
Keeping it KISS is the way to go no matter what you do