how to identify a computer which connects to a network?

[Rukshan Silva]

Hi all,

i am a final year student in Computing and i am doing a distributed file system for my final year project. And can i just know how to identify a computer which connects to a network? your ideas are highly appreciable..

Thank You....

[Joe Ess]

That depends. What kind of network? TCP/IP identifies computers by IP address. DNS provides a way to relate a name to an IP address. There are other protocols (like jini or p2p networks) that allow computers to advertise themselves and be discovered by other computers.

[chandrakant karale]

I dont think you are asking about java api, right?.
Socket which is created when client connects to the server can give you the client's address.

Or your query is finding address of a computer which is connected to network, irrespective of whether it had made a request or not. If that is so

http://jcifs.samba.org/ may help