I guess I didn't really phrase myself correctly. I found a bunch of stuff but nothing that really helps. Most of the threads were either ancient or not related to my use case. I found one promising utility (djmount) but it was last updated like 2005 and I had no luck getting it to run on my pc.
That being said, I didn't think of searching for service discovery protocols
Yeah, as I said I currently access the server via FTP. I was just hoping there would be a better way to do it, because, while working, this isn't as reliable as I'd like it to be.