User-agent: Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0 (Macintosh/20041206)
Daniel Simon wrote:
i was very excited when i compiled the Bonjour prefpane in the latest
release and found "Wide-Area Bonjour." i've been playing around with
mDNSProxyResponderPosix and ssh tunnels for quite some time trying to
effectively add remote computers to my local subnet . . . but the
prospect of doing this directly (with domain registering?) sounds
great.
the problem is: absolutely no documentation. i've found a few leads
in this mailing list, but nothing that can get me (a 10.4 client user
with little sysadmin abibilities) from opening the prefpane (or
starting some daemon or other) to actually using wide-area bonjour.
so . . . is there anyone out there who could help? how is this done?
is tiger server required? do i need to run/download any daemons for
this to work? is this actually usable, or am i just looking at a
non-functional "teaser" prefpane? is there some missing
documentation i could download?
You don't need tiger (in fact, you even don't need a Mac), and you need
to configure a DNS server. At least, to advertise static services.
OK, a quick howto. Sorry if not all bits and pieces are correct.
Credit goes to Stuart Cheshire for showing this at a lecture once.
Critics goes to me or /dev/null
Bonjours works using DNS. For local area bonjour, it uses a special kind
of DNS services using multicast (mDNS). Wide area Bonjour, on the other
hand, uses normal DNS servers.
Now, let's say start with something simple. Say, you want to your domain
to advertise a website. Let's say my site is www.apple.com, and my
domain is macfreek.nl (OK, that's not really _my_ site, and my name is
not Steve, but that's why this is an example ;-) ).
To do this is an static way, you have to add a few records to your DNS
server. First of all, you want to advertise a webserver. Now you need to
know that the service type for a webserver is "_http._tcp". You can find
these at http://www.dns-sd.org/ServiceTypes.html
Now what you do, is you make a so-called "SRV" (Service Record) in your
DNS configuration, and you also need to add a "TXT" record:
Here is mine:
; service records
$ORIGIN macfreek.nl.
Apple._http._tcp IN SRV 10 100 80 www.apple.com.
Apple._http._tcp IN TXT "path=/"
The syntax for SRV records is:
Name._service._protocol IN SRV priority weight port target
Name is the human readable name of the service, and target is the
location of the service. RFC 2782 describes the other parameters.
The TXT record is often optionally, but I think the current version of
Apple's software (mDNSresponder) requires it. You can use the TXT record
to give additional information about the service. In this case, it gives
the path (you could change it to path=/quicktime/ if you want to point
to http://www.apple.com/quicktime/).
Note that Name is human readable, and can even contain spaces. However,
I haven't figured out how to do that yet.
Now this is pretty nice. You can even find about my service
advertisement online (that is, if the DNS isn't cached, I just added the
records for this short howto):
$ host -t ANY Apple._http._tcp.macfreek.nl.
Apple._http._tcp.macfreek.nl SRV 10 100 80 www.apple.com.
Apple._http._tcp.macfreek.nl text "path=/"
Now we're almost there. Bonjour still has to be told that there is a
service advertisement. Unfortunately, there is no wildcard in DNS:
$ host -t ANY *._http._tcp.macfreek.nl.
does not work.
So you need to point to it from your domain, using a PTR record:
; service records
$ORIGIN _http._tcp macfreek.nl.
_http._tcp IN PTR Apple._http._tcp.macfreek.nl.
Apple._http._tcp IN SRV 10 100 80 www.apple.com.
Apple._http._tcp IN TXT "path=/"
Note that you can have multiple PTR records.
Again, you can query this on-line:
$ host -t ANY _http._tcp.macfreek.nl.
_http._tcp.macfreek.nl domain name pointer Apple._http._tcp.macfreek.nl.
(Note that you'll see some other records, please ignore them. They were
from earlier experiments with SRV records).
As a side-note, DNS experts probably abbreviate this to:
; service records
$ORIGIN _http._tcp macfreek.nl.
@ IN PTR Apple._http._tcp.macfreek.nl.
Apple IN SRV 10 100 80 www.apple.com.
Apple IN TXT "path=/"
Now that this is all set up, let's tell the Bonjour prefpane to look for
records in the macfreek.nl domain:
Go to the Bonjour prefpane, and click the "Browsing" tab. Now click the
"+" and add the domain "macfreek.nl". Click apple.
Now, open Safari, and go to "Show all bookmarks" (in the bookmarks
menu). As you hopefully see, there is a record, named "Apple", which
points to "http://www.apple.com./";. This is the one fetched from DNS.
Of course, in DNS you can also advertise other services than websites.
For example, an Apple File Sharing Server, or a SubEthaEdit client, or a
H.232 video phone.
Now, this was just a short example how to add static records in DNS to
advertise your resources. However, what you probably want in the end is
to also do that dynamically, if resources come and go.
I can imagine that the "Hostname" and "Registration" tabs in Bonjour do
something like that, but I never checked that yet. I'm sure Kiren will
tell us the details soon enough (I just noticed that there is a service
type _dns-update._udp.<domain> registered by a familiar name).
Hopefully the Apple FAQ will be a bit more high-level, though I'm always
interested in all the gorry (or brilliant) details.
Regards,
Freek
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