Developing an application for communication between computers in a network

I need to develop a software application for a computers in a network开发者_开发知识库 in the following scenario: Computers in a network are monitored by another master computer running a controller program. The controller is a software appln which performs network discovery, gets data from the discovered computers and performs a set of operations on the discovered computers.

I have made progress until this level: 1. Program for network discovery. o/p is IPs of all the active machines on n/w. 2. Basic program implementing RMI(rejected sockets as the program might have diff implementations)

My doubts: 1.Assuming that I need to send the instructions of operation to be executed on client machines with diff IPs, how do I do it with RMI? How do I connect to other clients,in the first place using RMI? 2.After connecting, how do I transmit instructions to and fro the controller?

Please help me out!

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You might try reading the JNDI tutorial. It covers aspects of discovering other computers and communicating them at a level that may be useful to your project. The tutorial is located here: http://download.oracle.com/javase/jndi/tutorial/trailmap.html