Hey guys,

I'm starting to make a new application. Basically the app will be installed on all the servers in my LAN. From there i want all servers to communicate with each other, however i'm having a hard time trying to think of a good way to do so. I want something that's extremely reliable, and easy to implement without too much overhead.

before i go further, this communication is going to be fairly minimal. Basically each server will kind of 'ping' all the other servers running the app. A simple 'are you alive' kind of message needs to be sent out and a response sent back confirming (pong).

It will also be sending some short strings of information as well (like an email address, and few other little things), so i can't simply just icmp ping the servers, or whatever.

So far the only ways i can think to do this are Sockets and mailslots. Sockets, i'd really like to stay away from, as they can be nasty to debug and use in the way i would need to use them. Mailslots seem also to be dead, and could be very difficult to find documentation on. If i did use sockets, I think UDP sockets would be ideal for this situation.

I welcome any suggestions, thanks!