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Apple Releases Bonjour for Windows 1.0.3
MacDailyNews is reporting that Apple has released Bonjour for Windows 1.0.3. From the article: "Bonjour, also known as zero-configuration networking, enables automatic discovery of computers, devices, and services on IP networks. Bonjour uses industry standard IP protocols to allow devices to automatically discover each other without the need to enter IP addresses or configure DNS servers."
I believe SuSE supports Bonjour out of the box, but it's been quite awhile since I made that discovery. The backstory is kind of fun, though.
.local as the TLD for the AD domain. Wow, was that a mistake. All the macs on the network needed a user-created patch to enable .local DNS requests to pass through to an actual DNS server. I discovered the SuSE (at least I _think_ it was SuSE) "feature" when I tried to set up a box for play.
We had a less-than-clueful consultancy come in to help us do an Active Directory installation on top of our NT4 domain. They suggested we use
It is completely different. Wireless Zero Configuration on Windows is a serviced used to connect your machine to 802.11 wireless networks, and (apparantly) to 802.1X network authorization systems.
Bonjour is a completely different animal, that is more of a combination of a decentralized DNS, and a way for machines to say "hey, heere are the services I offer that you can use" to any other machines on the network. Each machine running a full Bonjour/ZeroConf installation will advertise its name on the network, and the network services it provides. A system might, for example, advertise that it offers SSH, HTTP, FTP, AFP, Samba, and printing services. A client machine running Bonjour/ZeroConf that connects to this network will automatically know about these other services on the network, and can thus offer them as connection options to the user as is approperiate.
For example, say you take your laptop to the airport. You open it up, and get a wireless connection through Windows as usual. You fire up your web browser, and in a special bookmark menu you automatically see the links for arrivals, departures, and general airport information.
Or you walk into an office you are visiting, and need to print off a document. You open up the document, select Print, and find in the print dialog that your system has already found all available printers on your subnet.
You hit the cafe, and decide to fire up your favorite music application to listen to some tunes. Other people are there doing the same thing, and your system finds their playlists, and lets you browser through them and play them on your own laptop.
These are the sorts of things that Bonjour/ZeroConf permit. It's like a distributed DNS, where each machine only needs to know about itself, and the resolution database gets built dynamically. But it goes one step further to describe not just the hosts, but the public services those hosts offer.
I run Bonjour a lot on my networks. I do have a few Macs, but most of the systems I'm running it on are Linux systems. A client that connects to my personal network (something which is of course restricted by both WPA2 and a MAC filter list) will learn about all of the services they have public access to, including a few print gateways, digital audio streaming services, network sharing services, multimedia sharing services, chat services, and a variety of others. Suitably enabled client applications will know about these systems automatically, and can then build the relevent on screen menus or selection dialogs or whatnot to permit connecting to these services. And for a significantly large network size, it is significantly easier for an administrator to configure one printer to use Bonjour/ZeroConf than it is to have to tell potentially hundreds of clients where the printer is on the network.
Yaz.
One service I would love would be a hack to SMB to bypass the idiotic Master Browser peer discovery mechanism in Windows workgroups so it can use ZeroConf instead. In a domain-less Windows network browsing across machines is always a PITA, especially for machines with intermittend connectivity (i.e. notebooks). Alternatively, a complete replacement of SMB that dropped in neatly into Windows Explorer would work too.
I tried it at home with the various machines there, but Bonjour for Windows sucked (only worked for printers anyway) and Linux, well, isn't there yet (I'm wondering if that shouldn't be an acronym: LITY. I seem to be using it a lot since I switched to a Mac).
This is a technology that should be everywhere and one you seriously don't want to be without once you have seen it (the other is Spotlight -- I'm never going to use a desktop machine again that doesn't have live searching). If you have a chance to use it, go for it.