Why didn’t anyone tell me…

So we’re using this thing at work called staf to trigger tests, copy files, collect results, that kind of thing. I mention this because at least my experience with it is marred. This is at least partially because I’m using it on groups of virtual machines that are resumed in the middle of their dhcp leases or after those leases have expired, which sometimes will leave them offline without a little kick in the tenders. Finding the address of a newly available machine is not as trivial as it seems. I did try a couple interesting things to solve this.
Bonjour and other forms of zeroconf are available, but the broken network was not solved. And having so many VMs on the network at a time meant finding unique naming or something.
So identification of pseudoremote machines with unknown or duplicate hostnames is a problem. I eventually settled on using VMware Tools remote API to send over a script that resets networking and returns a text dump of ifconfig or ipconfig. The host parses and I get the new address. I’d rather have something more clean, but this works for now.