Step by step tutorial on Wide Area Bonjour

[jw2002]

Is anyone aware of a step by step tutorial on setting up and using Wide Area Bonjour? I have two subnets and unfortunately they can't see each others machines since mDns can't cross subnets. So I went into Snow Leopard Server and activated Wide Area Bonjour Browsing by following to the letter what the Snow Leopard Network Admin manual says to do. I clicked to enable and named the browsing subdomain "bonjour.example.com." (but used my own domain name in place of example). However, services from one subnet still aren't showing up in the Shared pane of the Finder window of a client on the other subnet. Yes, a little earth icon called "example.com" does show up, containing an icon called "bonjour", but it contains nothing. I also went in to the Sharing on each client mac and clicked on edit, checked "used dynamic global hostname", and checked "advertise using bonjour", but the hosts still aren't showing up on clients on the other subnet. So obviously I am missing some major step.

I'm also wondering if Wide Area Bonjour is even worth the hassle. Maybe it would be easier to just enable multicast routing of the mDNS packets between the subnets and be done with it. It's not like I need Wide Area Bonjour for any fancy reason such as connecting subnets on different continents. It's more a consequence of the inability of OS X to truly bridge network interfaces into a single subnet.

[calderone]

This should help:
http://www.afp548.com/article.php?st...90205204942121

[andrewtj]

Assuming your two subnets are private, Wide-Area Bonjour isn't a good fit. Hosts will only create the appropriate DNS records if they can determine that they have either a world-routeable address or the ability to setup port-forwards via NAT-PMP/uPNP for the services they advertise.

If you can, just enable multicast traffic for 224.0.0.251:5353 between the subnets.

[jw2002]

Thanks for the link above. I had read that material already, and it was actually what made me question if wide area bonjour is worth the hassle. And thanks for the suggestion to just enable multicast traffic between the two subnets. I will definitely explore that avenue. i'm wondering if this can be achieved by as simply as adding an appropriate "ipfw fwd" rule...

[andrewtj]

Originally Posted by jw2002

i'm wondering if this can be achieved by as simply as adding an appropriate "ipfw fwd" rule...

I will give you a definite maybe

You may have better luck getting an answer to this over on ServerFault.com

[macdroid]

Did you ever figure this out? I hate to dig up an old thread, but I support recycling

I just purchased a Canon MX870 printer, and have it connected to my network using the wired Ethernet interface. However, my MBP is usually on my wireless network, which is a separate network segment. Both segments are connected to my main firewall (m0n0wall) which has 3 interfaces, 1 for WAN, 1 for WiFi, and 1 for LAN.

When I plug the laptop in, I can access the scanner/printer services, but when I go back to wifi, I lose this ability. Has anyone figured out an easy way to deal with this? I would like to keep my wired and wireless networks separate.

[wedebugyou]

DNS records are hard to configure and difficult to maintain for the wide area bonjour. You will need to add one every time you add a new service.

Try using a "bridge" vpn instead. Here is a guide on how to do it.

Cheers

John

[bathurstguy]

Just in case anyone in the future is wanting to set up bonjour across subsets using Microsoft DNS, here is a link to a great step-by-step article:
http://sybaspot.com/configuring-dns-...print-for-ios/

[Les Kern]

Also, know Bonjour will not pass between different VLANs.

[assembled]

Originally Posted by Les Kern

Also, know Bonjour will not pass between different VLANs.

I think you mean L2 broadcast domain.

I'm looking right now at a L2 network broadcast domain that covers 8 physical sites and is on 4 different VLAN IDs depending on which site it is on.

Aerohive have a Bonjour Gateway...