Bonjour, c’est magnifique!
Written by Arnan on January 17, 2009 – 7:17 pm
That’s right! It stitches everything together via my LAN. Even windows gets the idea and works with it. Linux can too… But it takes a bit of a stretch to get it working, my Ubuntu server isn’t using it. And shows up nowhere 
. Today i was thinking about what was going via Bonjour these days and it seems not much, “the network”. But, when you go a bit deeper it appears that a lot of things in the network use Bonjour. And that’s why it’s so great. Discovery services make use of it. The printer is shared via Bonjour. I manage my server via Bonjour. Screen sharing goes via Bonjour. Airport configuration goes via Bonjour. Filesharing via AFP makes use of Bonjour. And there are a bunch more appliances that use Bonjour, like Cyberduck for local FTP/SFTP and SSH servers for instance. iTunes synchronization… And the list goes on.
The best bit however is. The only configuration you need to do is hook up all the devices to the same physical network. That’s it. The rest goes automatic.
But what is Bonjour, an application? Think of it as a way of communicating. Technically it grabs a bunch of network layers and makes them into one. Automating them. This takes away all the configuration fuss that can make networking a difficult job. In my work i often had to explain to people why their computer could not connect to the internet but could perfectly fine communicate with other computers in the same network. Which to them meant the router was fine. Even though the router was non-responsive. This was because the router crashed or whatever but Bonjour doesn’t work in the router but from each device on the network. Thus the computers communicated directly without the need of a DHCP server or DNS service. Or even an IP address.
Easy as that!
Tags: bonjour, network |
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