Apple's Bonjour Available for Windows

inblosam writes "Apple's Bonjour ('also known as zero-configuration networking, enables automatic discovery of computers, devices, and services on IP networks') is now available for Windows! A Bonjour icon shows up in Internet Explorer to enable Bonjour browsing, along with the Bonjour Printer Wizard. Developers can download the Bonjour SDK. The benefits would appear to be for Apple customers (more Bonjouring with more networks) and to gain Apple switchers by enticing Windows customers."

Comments

Re:Um.. okay

[tkokesh]

The name. Apple got sued by Tibco about the Rendezvous trademark, so they changed the name to "Bonjour".

KDE has it too

[m50d]

KDE added support with 3.4, for example the public file server advertises itself over zeroconf (same protocol, different name). So this is starting to look like a good technology for those in a heterogenous environment

Re:UPnP

[wargolem]

Here's a good comparison of UPnP and Zeroconf. Zeroconf is the base of Apple's Bonjour.

Re:UPnP

[TheRaven64]

Bonjour, a.k.a. Rendezvous a.k.a. ZeroConf is much more light-weight than UPnP. It is also more low-level - defining the mechanism, rather than a complex set of profiles. ZeroConf is purely service discovery - it is used for advertising the existence of other, existing, protocols, rather than for actually performing any communication directly. As such, it is very easy to add ZeroConf to an existing server or peer-to-peer protocol - you just advertise the port people connect to and the protocol they should use, rather than having to modify any existing networking code.

Note that I am far more familiar with ZeroConf than with UPnP, so I may have miss-characterised UPnP in this post.

Re:Okay

[Reverant]

There is a Posix-compatible version of Zeroconf for Linux. Just download it from Apple's CVS (You will need an ADC account). Under bash: export CVS_RSH=ssh export CVSROOT=:ext:apsl@anoncvs.opensource.apple.com:/cv s/apsl cvs co mDNSResponder Then use your ADC ID and ADC password as a password, like this: my_adc_email@host.com:my_adc_password I've been using Zeroconf on my Linux laptop with no problems whatsoever, eg. Safari sees my laptop as a web server (I run Apache for site demos) and there is no need to manually enter the server's IP. Unfortunately, there is no Printer Wizard bundled. Duh.

Programs and ease of use

[puregen1us]

ZeroConf is the official name, Apples used to use Rendezvous, now it's Bonjour.

You won't have seen it advertised explicitly, it simply sits and works.

It is used for sharing in the iApps:
iTunes
iPhoto
chatting in iChat
Finding servers to use in the Server Admin tools,
Transmit (the Panic FTP client) supports it,
It is used to find file shares on the network, using AFP

Anywhere networking just happens, without having to do anything more than simply turn it on chances are Bonjour is behind it.

Alex

Re:UPnP

[quigonn]

Actually, zeroconf is more than service discovery.

zeroconf consists of:
- automatic allocation of IP address without DHCP
- name resolving without a central DNS server
- service discovery without a central directory service

TiVo support

[timbloom]

On my Mac, I can can browse bonjour sites on my local network in Safari. What is really cool is that my TiVo shows up. If you have the latest TiVo software (the version that added support for TiVoToGo) You can actually browse and download the .tivo files without using TiVo Desktop. If you are already doing this by http://ip/ you may like that bonjour makes it so you don't need to know the IP address, you just bookmark the *.local address. I assume that this also works with bonjour for windows. It's very useful.

Innovative

[rev_karol]

This is some of the coolest use of the technology: SubEthaEdit lets a group of people work on a document at the same time using Bonjour. This is the way networking should work. If the boys there get their act together and create a Windows (and Linux) version, this app could be used everywhere!

Re:UPnP

[DrPizza]

"What's wrong with DHCP?"

It needs a DHCP server.

This is why MS invented APIPA (automatic private ip addressing), in the 169.254.0.0/16 range, which made its debut with Windows 98. If a network adaptor is set to DHCP but no DHCP server responds, it picks an IP in that range. This allows ad hoc local networks to form.

ZeroConf takes APIPA and adds to it multicast DNS (again, because ad hoc networks don't have DNS servers that they can publish names to). Any machine on the local network can listen to the mDNS requests and respond accordingly; it uses specially formed DNS names to publish services (in a manner broadly equivalent to, but IIRC incompatible with, SRV records).

UPnP uses a different mechanism for service discovery (it uses multicast HTTP instead of multicast DNS). It also goes a step further and allows devices to publish known, standardized interfaces.

ZeroConf lets iTunes search for other local iTunes and share media libraries. IIRC only iTunes knows how to talk to these other iTunes instances, because there's no ZeroConf standard "media library" facility.

UPnP lets *media players* search for other local *media players*. These media players are, as long as they conform to the right interface, mutually compatible; it doesn't matter if a "Media Library" is a SAN or a program like Winamp or WMP or some putative networked iPod or hifi system; it just conforms to a standard "Media Library" interface and can stream files accordingly. Likewise the "Media Renderer"; I can control a Media Renderer without caring about its exact nature (it might be a hifi or a PC or something else entirely).

UPnP works well, and can do everything ZeroConf does and then some; it's probably most widely used for Internet Gateway Devices; you get your nice cheap combined cable modem/router box from Linksys, and Windows can see and recognize the device, allowing it to report on connection status, provide a "built-in" link to the device's management web page, and so on and so forth.