Apple Releases Bonjour for Windows 1.0.3 195
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."
Gosh (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Gosh (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Gosh (Score:2)
I Own a cat! (Score:2)
Re:Gosh (Score:2)
Re:Gosh (Score:2)
damn French.
Re:Gosh (Score:2)
Re:Gosh (Score:2)
Amazing that the thing still was able to load. Didn't do much, though....come to think of it Windows still doesn't do much.
Hello (Score:2, Funny)
wow (Score:3, Funny)
Installing Bonjour: Double-click the Bonjour installer and follow the onscreen instructions.
Thanks, I never would have thought of that.
Re:wow (Score:2)
Re:wow (Score:2)
Don't need it (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Don't need it (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Don't need it (Score:2, Funny)
Please.
Re:Don't need it (Score:2)
Re:Don't need it (Score:5, Funny)
I'm not French, dammit!
Re:Don't need it (Score:3, Informative)
Bonjour vs UPnP (Score:2)
Is UPnP widely used already, and if so could Bonjour ever gain any traction in the Windows market?
Re:Bonjour vs UPnP (Score:2)
Re:Bonjour vs UPnP (Score:3, Funny)
It's much more hip and cool. And it smokes French cigarettes.
Re:Bonjour vs UPnP (Score:2)
Re:Bonjour vs UPnP (Score:5, Funny)
But only 30 hours per week.
I keed, I keed...
Re:Bonjour vs UPnP (Score:5, Informative)
For example, there does not appear to be a profile for something like iChat (Internet Chat), Xcode (Distributed Computing), or Font Sharing. Yet Bonjour enables both of these since the standards bodies do not limit the services.
This always comes up. (Score:2)
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.
Re:Bonjour vs UPnP (Score:2)
If you use Bonjour, you just replace the Bonjour library with this new one.
Not very useful (Score:2, Insightful)
It would be nice if it was an actual zeroconf windows client, with Samba support or something. But it's not.
Re:Not very useful (Score:2)
Uh, it is.
Internet Explorer??? (Score:2)
From the article..
Bonjour for Windows includes a plugin to discover advertised HTTP servers using Internet Explorer.
uhh, no thanks...
Re:Internet Explorer??? (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, it's incredibly useful. There are a boatload of appliances that you plug into your network nowadays that have web servers built-in to them. For instance, everybody has a firewall/NAT appliance nowadays. What if you got to the configuration page simply by finding it in a menu in your browser rather than having to either guess or look up the default IP address?
So Bonjour (Rendezvous) is ... (Score:2)
Bonjour... (Score:2)
Linux (Score:2)
By "working", I mean I want to be able to telnet machine.local or ping machine.local like I can on OS X...
Re:Linux (Score:2)
A lot of the usefulness bonjour (zeroconf/whatever) provides that the user sees must be provided in the applications themselves. The underlying protocol that allows apps to advertise they provide, say, "httpd" -- and allows other apps to request a list of .local address that provide a given service -- won't do squat for the user unless apache and firefox (etc) add code to make use of it.
That said, last time I looked into this (last year, but fairly intently) the protocol is available on Linux that allow ma
Re:Linux (Score:2)
I know, but I'd like at least ssh, ping, traceroute etc. to work.
They all work on OS X, and I don't imagine Apple has written special code for all of them. Instead, they just get the DNS resolver to work for Bonjour addresses as well as regular DNS.
That's what I want to do for Linux.
Doesn't gtet much simpler than this (Score:3, Informative)
Buh... (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe, just maybe, I don't want devices jumping onto my network and configuring themselves any way they like.
Relevant Link? (Score:2)
Apple got me with Bonjour (among other things) (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
How Ironic (Score:2)
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 a
Re:How is this different than... (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/bonjour/ [apple.com]
Bonjour is more than just wireless and DHCP. It automatically discovers and configures printers and other network devices without even needing to use a wizard.
Re:How is this different than... (Score:5, Informative)
for those that don't know, bonjour enables a machine to not only broadcast a DNS name for itself ("hey everyone, I'm alberto.local!), but it also the services it offers ("hey, I do ftp, http, and jabber!").
When it first became available I was pretty vocal about how I could get the same thing done with host files... but as I've gotten older and the number of machines on my network have grown, it's become a lot easier to access the OSX machines without needing to know their IPs, and configuring the host files of my 4 linux servers is a pain in the ASS.
This is also available for linux, but I haven't gotten it working properly (or really tried, for that matter). I believe the packages are called Howl and mdnsResponder.
Re:How is this different than... (Score:4, Interesting)
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
Re:How is this different than... (Score:2)
Re:How is this different than... (Score:2)
Re:How is this different than... (Score:3, Insightful)
I myself am in the process of replacing one of these poor design decisions with a brand new AD in a company that is about 50% Mac OS X and 50% Windows 2K/XP/2K3. The arrogant asshats who built the original AD never consulted with the people responsible for over half the computers in the company that run Mac OS X. Not to mention the fact that just about every networkable printer that's come out in the past couple of years supports mDNS/Rendezvous/Bonjour/Zeroconf rig
Re:How is this different than... (Score:2)
and I'm not an MCSE, or much of an admin for that matter, more of a coder.. but have had to work around enough garbage over the years.
Re:How is this different than... (Score:2)
Not knowing about bugs in OSX might be ignorance, but it's surely not arrogance.
Re:How is this different than... (Score:4, Informative)
I have a Fedora Core 4 system that advertises Netatalk shares and HTTP via mDNSresponder. Fedora 5 has dropped Howl in favor of Avahi [avahi.org] -- another zeroconf implementation -- though I haven't done anything with it yet.
Re:How is this different than... (Score:2)
Windows does that too, just FYI.
Re:How is this different than... (Score:2)
Re:How is this different than... (Score:2)
Re:How is this different than... (Score:2)
Re:How is this different than... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:How is this different than... (Score:5, Informative)
Xcode uses it to discover which clients on a network it can distribute complies to to speed up the horribly slow GCC.
Re:How is this different than... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:How is this different than... (Score:2)
It becomes a PITA because every time some shit-box XP install comes up it forces an election, sometimes it wins, and the browse list disappears. It takes forever for the browse list to be repopulated with so many client machines on the net
Re:How is this different than... (Score:3, Interesting)
If you're dancing the Samba, you can use the "Preferred Master = Yes" directive in smb.conf to do this. Works like a charm.
Re:How is this different than... (Score:2)
Remember what they say about people that assume things, it makes you look like a troll.
Re:How is this different than... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:How is this different than... (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, if you count the hidden Wide-Area Bojour [dns-sd.org] stuff you're up to '89.
AppleTalk, we missed 'ya.
Re:How is this different than... (Score:3, Funny)
Missing from the list:
This will cause you to grow a goatee.
This will cause an incredible thirst for lattes and koolaid.
Re:How is this different than... (Score:2)
Re:How is this different than... (Score:2)
Or even koolaid lattes.
Re:How is this different than... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Windows 1.0.3? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Windows 1.0.3? (Score:4, Funny)
Therefore, please mod my above comment down to troll where it belongs.
Challenge? (Score:4, Informative)
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 [apple.com] 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 [zeroconf.org], which has multiple independent implementations [wikipedia.org], which has support from both proprietary [apple.com] and open-source [avahi.org] camps, and is supported out-of-the-box by many major hardware manufacturers [apple.com]. If there's any competition in this area, I don't know what it is.
Umm, wow. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:This is the firts step (Score:2)
Re:I bet network engineers (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:I bet network engineers (Score:2)
Re:I bet network engineers (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I bet network engineers (Score:5, Funny)
Yes, that's much easier than choosing the printer you want from a list of those available to you.
Re:I bet network engineers (Score:2)
I wrote this because I was pleasently surprised how
Re:I bet network engineers (Score:2)
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.
Re:I bet network engineers (Score:2)
Re:I bet network engineers (Score:3, Interesting)
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 workgr
Re:I bet network engineers (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:I bet network engineers (Score:2)
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 spa
Re:I bet network engineers (Score:5, Insightful)
-Kurt
Re:I bet network engineers (Score:2)
Re:I bet network engineers (Score:2, Interesting)
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).
Re:I bet network engineers (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:I bet network engineers (Score:2)
Re:I bet network engineers (Score:2)
Re:I bet network engineers (Score:2)
You might want to look into that...
Re:I bet network engineers (Score:2)
Re:I bet network engineers (Score:2)
What? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:What? (Score:3, Funny)
*In an alternate universe
Re:What? (Score:2)
Re:I bet network engineers (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:I bet network engineers (Score:2)
Re:Wild guess... (Score:4, Informative)
To put it another way, TCP/IP is about transport, DHCP is about configuration, and Bonjour/Zeroconf is about discovery.
Re:Wild guess... (Score:2)
I guess I've just never seen a need for such a product; I didn't know there was a market for it.
Re:Wild guess... (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
I
Re:Wild guess... (Score:2)
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.
Other
Re:Wild guess... (Score:2)
Dagny Taggart knows John Galt quite well, if you catch my drift....
Re:So if u dont run any mac machines this is usele (Score:2)