So, we have some netgear prosafe switches and some IP Power 9258 devices where I'm currently working, unfortunately, these don't always get the IP configuration that you'd expect (or, they get a DHCP lease from a DHCP server that I can't query the leases from...), however both come with little windows utilities that "magically" find the devices and give back (quite a lot, really) information on the IP configuration of the device. Being somewhat of a "oh god, I don't want to use windows, please don't make me" type person, and knowing the the IPPower 9258 boxes were going to a remote site where I'll only have linux machines on the same network as them, I figured that it would be a good idea to sit with wireshark and find out how the heck these tools worked.

Turns out that both just send out a UDP broadcast packet (or two) and then sit and wait for responses - this meant that to get the information that I wanted out of them I could get away with writing very little python, taking the UDP packet that I got back, taking the payload and dismantling it piece by piece so that I could display that information. The scripts aren't at all polished, but if anyone happens to need something (that should work multi-platform, too) to discover either of these, let me know and I can throw you what I've got.