I’m setting up my new laptop, and for obvious reasons I have to copy over some data from the old to the new laptop.

The wireless network here at my apartment-sharing is crappy; and it lacks a local DNS server offered by newer DSL routers. So I would have to find out the current IPs of my laptops to copy data around (note that the router also doesn’t give you IP persistence apparently, the laptops have new IPs each reconnect…)

mDNS to a rescue. Multicast DNS (Bonjour / Zeroconf / Avahi) comes in handy here. It allows me to locate my laptops by just using “hostname.local” (using the libnss-mdns package) or using the avahi zeroconf browser (package: avahi-discover).