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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 didn't know anyone still used Windows 1.0
How is this any different than the Wireless Zero configuration that comes with Windows XP? It seems that they all offer the same thing except the Windows Wireless Zero is already on the machine.
Let me be the first to say, "Hello" to our new, uh, wait, never-mind... (ducks)
Bradley Holt
Installing Bonjour: Double-click the Bonjour installer and follow the onscreen instructions.
Thanks, I never would have thought of that.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Bonjour for Windows 1.0.3 requires Windows 2000/2003 or Windows XP. Make sure you have the latest Service Pack installed for your computer using Windows Update.
The title is taken out of context. The program is called "Bonjour for Windows" and the version is 1.0.3
As far as the product, hasn't Microsoft, Novell, and an ungodly amount of other smaller companies tried to do this before? Has anyone used Bonjour? What's network traffic like? ActiveDirectory and Novell are both rather chatty applications when it comes to the network. If we can find a way to keep things quiet, this is a great idea. However, there's the challenge.
maybe its because apple are actually releasing this on windows
seems an odd move by apple, surely they could have used this as another reason to switch to mac...
I've already said Bonjour to Windows...
If you disagree with me on social issues, then it's pretty clear that you are a narrow-minded bigot.
Wild guess, you never have used it.
Are you fucking kidding? Mac users have been using this without even knowing it for over four years. They don't have to know about it because it just works. Go home, pop your PowerBook open, Command-P, and bam, document comes out of your home printer. Go to school or the office, hit Command-P, and you can choose from a human-readable list of every printer available to you. No configuration, no wizards. It's less chatty than Windows' so-called Simple Service Discovery Protocol, and more importantly, it actually functions.
You Windows and Linux users are so cute, still living in the '90s, so accustomed to mediocrity. "Has anyone used Bonjour" indeed.
Is UPnP widely used already, and if so could Bonjour ever gain any traction in the Windows market?
We apologize for the inconvenience.
Yup, that would be a wild comment.
Jaysyn
There is a war going on for your mind.
Hey slashdot, I hear Apple will be releasing iTunes 6.0.5 for Windows any day now!!!!
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
You're a moron. Read about ZeroConf a little bit before you troll, kay?
I don't see the point of this. The stuff is already built into the Apple Windows products.
It would be nice if it was an actual zeroconf windows client, with Samba support or something. But it's not.
Ah, but OS X doesn't use a BSD kernel! It uses a Mach kernel--the userland is BSD. You know, programs like ftp, things that are totally different on Windows :)
English is easier said than done.
My mac finds network printers with no delay at all and gets the appropriate drivers as needed (the Windows equivalent has sucked ever since they introduced it and it's specific to printers).
My co-workers' iTunes libraries show up instantly for me to play on my own mac.
iChat with no central server
There are others, but the point is that they all work over the same protocol. No specific network programming is required as long as a device is Bonjour-enabled. It's not the greatest thing since sliced bread but it makes networking easier. With Windows Microsoft prefers to program each device type separately.
Developers: We can use your help.
The protocols you describe deal serve very different purposes. Bonjour complements them, rather than replacing them.
To put it another way, TCP/IP is about transport, DHCP is about configuration, and Bonjour/Zeroconf is about discovery.
Short Answer: Bonjour doesn't compare to Univeral Plug-n-Play
... ie it's a broadcast protocol that finds printers and other services on your local subnet.
Bonjour compares to NetBIOS-over-TCP/IP (aka NBT aka "Workgroups")
Unless you are using something Apple-specific like iTunes, most apps already use NBT.
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
From the article..
Bonjour for Windows includes a plugin to discover advertised HTTP servers using Internet Explorer.
uhh, no thanks...
"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution inevitable" - JFK
The dogcow says "Moof!"
That makes more sense. The copy/paste press release in TFA was rather vague.
I guess I've just never seen a need for such a product; I didn't know there was a market for it.
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
There's a difference between computers and services in a distributed environment (network). DHCP operates at a lower level to get individual computers into the environment with an addressable endpoint (IP address). Computer names provide a poor form of 'fixed' DNS for addressing of packets inside the environment from one machine to the other, commonly used for such things as file sharing when you know you need to connect to the named file server and a particular share on it.
Services, on the other hand, could exist on any of the computers and Bonjour (formerly Rendezvous) and other service discovery protocols (such as used in Jini) work at this level, looking for particular services without a care of what computer on which they run, or if they changed from one computer to another because that computer got taken offline and replaced by another one. Services could include an iTunes broadcast stream, an iChat presence, or a service that, when called via a program, can return the expected weight of x pairs of jeans, for a totally inane example.
In the iChat example, if you had a coworker moving between machines, you wouldn't know which one to message just by computer name (such as that Messaging Service that Windows NT has where you can send a message to another machine by machine name and it comes up in a dialog window). With Bonjour, wherever your coworker logged in, your iChat would find his identity as a service and know to route your iChats messages to him at his current machine.
Gratified as I am that my little rant above got modded up to +3 Informative, I don't really think it represents the best of the Mac community. The truth is, we Mac users feel deep pity for those to whom Rendezvous/Bonjour (ZeroConf by any other name) seems like some kind of magical future technology. No one deserves to be trapped in the configuration hell that is Windows or Linux. Even worse is that you people have come to expect such utter user-unfriendliness, and so you sneer at those whose work would improve your lives. You are the most pathetic of them all, and we Mac users shed a collective tear in sympathy for you.
Therefore, please mod my above comment down to troll where it belongs.
-Kurt
"We can categorically state we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - UK military spokesman, July 2007
The Windows version (NBT) is not specific to printers. However, you're more likely to see it in use for finding SQL Servers than for chat programs.
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
You haven't used Bonjour, have you? That shit can find computers not on the network. And let you use those printers and other application data. Automatically.
(and I'm not kidding. When my neighbor's daughter launches iTunes, her library shows up in my iTunes, and I can play them. Note that my network is WEP-enabled and MAC filtered, and I'm not part of her network).
sort of like Jini, only non-portable and a few years later?
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
When my neighbor's daughter launches iTunes, her library shows up in my iTunes, and I can play them. Note that my network is WEP-enabled and MAC filtered, and I'm not part of her network
You might be WEP-enabled and MAC-filtered, but that doesn't mean you aren't on the same network. (WEP and MAC filtering have nothing to do with Bonjour services specifically.) Bonjour works on a subnet, not over a WAN; getting it to work across separate subnets requires special configuration.
You two are on the same network.
Mikey-San
Karma: +Eleventy billion (mostly affected by watching Celebrity Jeopardy)
And frankly, the windows equivalent is pretty easy. Just type "\\servername\printername" and the print queue is opened & the drivers are installed for you from the print server if you don't have them. You can quietly put it in the login script with "rundll32 printui.dll,PrintUIEntry /in /c\\servername /n\\servername\printername /q". You can also set the default printer with the /y switch.
Yes, that's much easier than choosing the printer you want from a list of those available to you.
you wouldn't know which one to message just by computer name (such as that Messaging Service that Windows NT has where you can send a message to another machine by machine name and it comes up in a dialog window)
Not really the best example, since you can also use the login name with the Windows messaging protocol, and it pops up on any or every machine on which that user is logged in. Or you can use the workgroup/domain name, and it pops un on every machine.
(Used to be a handy simple tool in LANs, until spammers found they could use it to spam boxes directly connected to the net, and MS stupidly disabled it in some Service Pack. You can re-enable it, but when you send "Going down for maintenance in 5 minutes" on the LAN, there are always some machines on which it hasn't been re-enabled, or has been re-disabled).
It really is fairly simple. The user would only do the \\servername\printername thing, I know, because I've been on the user side in the past. Don't get me wrong, there was also a list, but opening that up and selecting the right one from the 40 available printers was slower than just entering the name I had memorised. (The servername is the same for all printers, incidently, I essentially had to remember a number that was also on a label on the printer...)
I wrote this because I was pleasently surprised how straightforward it is. The driver is silently installed on first access, you never have to screw around with it - it just works!
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Monsieur ScuttleMonkey!
It's kind of one of those products that you don't think you have a use for, until you use it accidentally. Then it strikes you as being really handy.
I didn't remember that it existed when a friend brought a PowerBook over to my house and was sitting in the living room, plugged into my LAN; a while later he asked to print something. I said "sure, go for it" figuring he'd put it on a flash drive or something and I'd print it for him, or he'd email it to me. But no, he just sent it to my shared laser printer.
It's also how Apple products do a lot of their "sharing" magic, i.e., seeing other people's photo and audio libraries on your computer.
It's kind of a subtle technology, it's not going to wow people (my friend didn't even understand why what he did was interesting, he just selected the printer from the list in the dialog box), but it works pretty well.
I'd love to see it get better supported on Linux.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
As far as the product, hasn't Microsoft, Novell, and an ungodly amount of other smaller companies tried to do this before?
...). Oh, and lots of GNOME users. And maybe a few Windows iTunes users.
Novell has historically not been strong on IP networking; more recently they've figured out that IP is the way to go, but I haven't heard of any cross-platform, open-standard, widely-supported IP-network technology from them. Or from Microsoft, for that matter. (How many UPNP printers can you name?)
Has anyone used Bonjour?
Only pretty much every Mac user (Safari, iTunes, iPhoto, iChat,
What's network traffic like? ActiveDirectory and Novell are both rather chatty applications when it comes to the network.
It uses caching, duplicate message suppression, and exponential backoff. Traffic is unnoticably light.
If we can find a way to keep things quiet, this is a great idea. However, there's the challenge.
Good thing those engineers at Apple figured it out 5 years ago, then!
Zeroconf is the only service of its type that I've heard of. It's certainly the only one that runs on pure-IP networks, whose standard is open, which has multiple independent implementations, which has support from both proprietary and open-source camps, and is supported out-of-the-box by many major hardware manufacturers. If there's any competition in this area, I don't know what it is.
It is needed if you want to dynamically discover something (or be discovered) on your network using Bonjour.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
There is a wide area version of Bonjour.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
on a related note, one of the other cool examples of bonjour is being able to be on a wired network and browse itunes shares using your wireless card (or vice versa, etc.)
"I DARE you to make less sense!"
Has anyone written a simple guide for how to get Bonjour working on Linux?
By "working", I mean I want to be able to telnet machine.local or ping machine.local like I can on OS X...
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Uh. No. They don't. In fact, I recently talked to Microsoft about their ZeroConf story. Right now they are saying that Universal Plug and Play will be replaced by a Web Services - Discovery thing that is coming out with Vista.
So, right now, you are better off building Bonjour into your products. You can negnotiate a license to distribute Bonjour with your app from Apple.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
Chuck Norris knows who John Galt is.
Dagny Taggart knows John Galt quite well, if you catch my drift....
The driver is silently installed on first access, you never have to screw around with it - it just works!
Never in my experience. It usually installed a version from the wrong version of Windows. It would regularly crash my workstation by installing a driver for 2000 on XP.
Developers: We can use your help.
I hope the "Web Services - Discovery thing" that comes with Vista will be free. No negotiating licenses needed.
Well, nearly all PCs in that office were still running 2000, I guess now I know why. ;)
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Maybe your experience is not that rare, but I've used several networked printers with several versions of windows (including XP) and never had any problems. As usual, it's a matter of luck.
If anyone is still unclear what this means for a user, there's an excellent video of a Google tech talk where Stuart Chesire explains what Bonjour is all about - it's a great example of a technical expert communicating information in a clear and informative manner, and it really explains the vision behind zero-conf -- http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-739868010 3951126462&q=Google+techtalks
The world has changed and we all have become metal men.
You insensitive clod!
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
sounds like UPNP
If you need web hosting, you could do worse than here
You're confusing enterprise features with SOHO features.
In a large enterprise, you'll have an OSX server doing auth/login management/print serving/etc, just as you would in a windows/AD network.
The difference is, when I bring my laptop over to your house, if you have an airport box with print server, and another mac (or software running bonjour protocol for windows/linux), I will instantly see your printer, file server, ichat client, itunes songs, etc INSTANTLY, without wondering if we're on the same workgroup name/etc.
Yes you can still do it manually and script it, but it's nice to have the easy alternative.
I have used Bonjour (formally known as Rondezvous) and it is great. The simpliest and most useful application we us it for is printers. I can plug my computer onto any of the 32 subnets on my network and immedieatly print to any printer on the network without having to configure or install anything. Compare the two network printing experiences in a workgroup environment.
1. Windows way
plug computer into network
go to printers and faxes - add printer
wonder around building looking for closest printer
grab IP information off printer in building
go back to computer
create "local printer" printer port
find printer drivers
finnish the createing the printer using the wizard (and found drivers) and tie it to created printer port
open word document
hit print
print
2. Mac way (Using Bonjour)
plug computer into network
open word document
hit print (it will now list all printers on network)
select closest printer
print
There are many other examples from iChat (auto-populate all iChat users on lan) to iTunes (can share all songs every iTunes user on lan has with no configuration they just appear)
BEST of all to get it working you need two things -
one enable Bonjour(rondezvous) on networked printers (a matter of selecting enable)
two enable Bonjour on client computer (a matter of checking a box which is on by default)
This is amazing. Am I the only guy here who actually likes controlling his network in an orderly and well managed manner?
Maybe, just maybe, I don't want devices jumping onto my network and configuring themselves any way they like.
I am government man, come from the government. The government has sent me. -- G.I.R.
A link to the actual Bonjour product page at Apple.com would've been helpful.
Well, obviously, your neighbor's daughter has decrypted your WEP key and spoofed one of the MAC addresses in your AP's lookup table (or simply added her MAC to the list). Or maybe she added a VPN tunnel to your subnet.
You might want to look into that...
If you use Bonjour instead, don't bother worrying about it.
i'd hit it so hard, if you pulled me out you'd be the king of britain [bash.org]
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.
Zero Configuration software that you have to install and configure... is not zero configuration.
Unless this ships with Vista (complete with zero conf viruses) this wonderful technology will fail to help the people that need it... noobs. For sys admins and geeks this technology is like code completion, a time saver not an enabler. I guess our one, last hope is that it will be sneaked in with iTunes for Windows (hell they seem to get away with it for Quicktime), but then there is probably something a little amoral about installing a technology that makes it easier for people to find your network resources on an operating system where most of its users don't understand what a firewall does.
Scared of flying, pointy things snce 1979!
So if I don't run any mac osx machines this software is useless right?
I guess I've just never seen a need for such a product; I didn't know there was a market for it.
Here's an instance where it's super handy: Apple ships servers with no video card. To configure them, on first boot the Server will announce itself via BonJour regardless of the IP (or no IP if there is no DCHP server) that it's using. A client utility on any ol' random Mac you have (that's on the same network) will listen for those announcements, and thereby let you connect to and configure the Server.
Otherwise you'd have to know the IP address that the server had been given in order to ssh to it to configure, and if it was on a DHCP server, or worse not assigned an IP address, you'd not know how to get to it.
I use BJ with ssh all the time. I'm managing a pool of Macs, all of them assigned IPs via DHCP; they also don't have set hostnames because that's not really necessary. I want to get to one in particular and don't know at that moment what IP it has; so my terminal client can list all of the Macs broadcasting ssh-via-bj and I select the one that I want to get to from the list. Pretty slick.
--
$tar -xvf
no, most newer printer include this technology which means it can be used to find printers in your local network at home.
http://www.porchdogsoft.com/products/howl/InstallU nix.html
No, that's the point. Bonjour is able to talk to other computers outside of a LAN. I doubt a 10-year old girl is going around trying to hack my network.
This is a (not particularly well documented) setting on the server that was botched up. If you install a printer driver on the server, you'll usually end up installing the printer driver for the windows server OS *only*. When clients want to use the printer, they'll be presented with the same driver. However, you can add printer drivers for additional operating systems; well, windows OSes. the instructions are here. When a different OS client tries to connect, it's presented with its own driver version, if available. Make sure your friendly BOFH gets that link.
.ppd file that describes the printers specific options).
/b file.bin \\driver\printername or you can even output postscript directly to \\server\printername\filename.bin - the filename is ignored. Certified Postscript Level 3 printers (HP printers "emulate" PS3!) will even directly print off PDF files just copied to them; it's a native format to them. Quite a bit faster than viewing the PDF in acrobat, then printing it, though you lose options like double sided printing, n-up, etc.
One note; I've found that drivers for different windows versions can behave differently, even if it's the same printer driver version (yes, HP, I'm talking to you). Not only will they have ever so slightly different GUIs (confusing your lusers) but they'll be broken in interesting, and more importantly *different* ways.
To avoid too much heterogenity, I've had most luck using as-generic-as-possible postscript drivers (e.g. the adobe postscript drivers for windows 98/NT, and the built-in postscript driver on 000 and up, with a
You can also just send postscript (or PCL) files to a (ps/pcl) printer using copy
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
I have found networking on Mac's to be hit or miss. Seem like every version of OS, and intermitant releases of patchs, networking either works brilliantly, or not at all.
I mean, just try setting up a Mac to print to a printer connected on a Windows box. Depending on which version of OSX you have, and which patch, either this is braindead, or a cause for apoplexy.
While I can connect easily to Windows machines using smb, I have yet to actually SEE connected Windows boxes from a Mac, i.e. like Windows Network Neighbourhood. Conversely, while I may be able to see Mac machines connected in Windows Network Neighbourhood, I can't always connect to them.
Despite the firm root OSX has in Unix, networking has never been Apple's strong point, it might work well between Mac machines, but Mac/PC networking has always been hit or miss, and Apple doesn't seem to be improving it over time.
I can't see why Windows users will want Bonjour. I mean, networking on PC's is relatively braindead, and if configuration issues was a huge problem on Windows, Microsoft would have some other tool available. For the most part, Network Neighbourhood is all you need on windows to see and connect with other computers. But for people in mixed environments, Bonjour might be necessary so that Macs and finally work better networking with PC's.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
It has been done - nss-mdns. It's been packaged for most Linux distributions. Getting it working on my Debian box was a simple matter of apt-get install libnss-mdns and then edit /etc/nsswitch.conf to use the new nss plugin.
Myself, I use Access Connections.
Some slight manual configuration necessary, but it's all automatic and VERY smooth after that. Autodetects which network I'm on, sets default printers as necessary, etc., etc.
So if I don't run any mac osx machines this software is useless right?
No, if you had read the release notes you'd see that you can use the Bonjour Printer Wizard to discover local Bonjour/Rendezvous printers on your network. Almost all current printers have Bonjour built-in, at least network printers. If you do happen to have any Macs on your network running at least Mac OS X 10.4 your Windows PC will also be able to access any printers shared from those Macs.
If you don't really do any printer sharing on your home network or have a laptop that you take to other locations where there might be network printers or Macs with shared printers attached to them, you probably won't see any benefit from installing this.