Update I don't know if the additional parameters had anything to do with it. I thought restarting the network printer was sending the msgs but apparently that isn't the case. I just got lucky and caught a few boots.

FYI: This is perl, v5.8.0 built for MSWin32-x86-multi-thread
Binary build 806 provided by ActiveState Corp.http://www.ActiveState.com
Built 00:45:44 Mar 31 2003
Running on Windows 2000 Workstation.
@ISA = qw(IO::Socket);
$VERSION = "1.26";

Update2: Abigail-II your code works stright up on my machine. I just got to test it now.

use strict;
use warnings;

use IO::Socket::INET;

my $port   = getservbyname 'bootps', 'udp';
my $socket = IO::Socket::INET -> new (LocalPort  => $port,
                                      Broadcast  =>  1,
                                      Proto      => 'udp',
                                      ReuseAddr  => 1,
                                      Type       => SOCK_DGRAM)
             or die "Failed to bind to socket: $@";

my $mess;
$socket -> recv ($mess, 1024);
if (defined $mess) {
    print "Saw a bootp request.\n$mess\n";
} else {
    print "No bootp request.\n";
}
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