Its nice to be informed of the surfeit of generic network discovery tools available, thanks everyone.
Downside is that they can end up being a hodge-podge and lack camera specific capabilities. Just for kicks I started to write an extremely fragile and tediously coded pan-manufacturer meta-interface that works on the local broadcast segment and is able to accomplish the following tasks (for all supported mfrs, axis and stardot at this time:)
1. Discover any and all cameras on segment regardless of current IP settings
2. Change IP settings with default password
3. Change root password
4. Do all this for multiple cameras without intervention (batch)
Most all these camera finder seem to have these capabilities (1-3) tho they all have some custom API to do it.
One test would be to be able to take 10 cameras of all different mfrs out of the box, turn them on and have the tool set the network info and passwords for all cameras within a minute. But I'm still eight more mfrs away fron that, each one with its own interface and. screen scraping oddities, and so I just wanted to make sure that someone hadn't been foolish enough to try and do it already...