The Solicitation and Advertisement Protocol
Clerks and servers on the same Local Area Network (LAN) communicate by using the solicitation and advertisement protocol. A server broadcasts messages at regular intervals to advertise its existence to clerks on its LAN. The advertisement message contains data about the cell that the server belongs to, the server's network address, and the clearinghouse it manages. Clerks learn about servers by listening for these advertisements on the LAN. A clerk also sends out solicitation messages that request advertisements at startup.