Bonjour (software)
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Bonjour is a general method to discover services on a local area network. This technology is widely used throughout Mac OS X and allows users to set up a network without any configuration. Currently it is used by Mac OS X and on other operating systems to find printers and file sharing servers. It is also used by iTunes to find shared music, iPhoto to find shared photos, iChat, Adium, Fire, Skype and the Gizmo Project to find other users on the local network, TiVo Desktop to find digital video recorders, SubEthaEdit to find document collaborators, and OD4Contact to find and share contacts information. Additionally it is used by Safari to find local web servers and configuration pages for local devices, and by Asterisk to advertise telephone services along with configuration parameters to VoIP phones and dialers.
Without special DNS configuration, Bonjour only works on a single subnet, which is usually a small area.
Bonjour is sometimes misunderstood to make services on a personal computer (for instance, file sharing) available to the public Internet, which could be considered a security risk. In fact, Bonjour does not provide any extra access to services, even on the same local area network (LAN); it merely announces ("advertises") their existence. For example, a user can browse a list of nearby computers which share files — Bonjour on these computers has told the user that the service is available — but he or she must still provide a password to access any protected files on these machines. Additionally, Bonjour works only in a close range; by default, its messages only reach users of the same subnet. Thus, the only security impact of Bonjour is that advertised services are no longer protected by security through obscurity within the local subnet. If the services are protected through a means other than obscurity, they will remain protected.
Rendezvous was renamed Bonjour with the release of Mac OS X v10.4 due to a 2004 trademark settlement between Apple and Tibco Software Inc. Tibco had marketed a product with the name Rendezvous before Apple released the technology. It was widely rumored in 2004 that the new name would be OpenTalk, but this name was not picked (possibly due to the similarities to LocalTalk and PowerTalk).
Bonjour services are implemented at the application level largely using standard TCP/IP calls, rather than in the operating system. Although Mac OS X provides various Bonjour services, Bonjour works on other operating systems. Apple has made the source code of the Bonjour multicast DNS responder, the core component of service discovery, available as a Darwin open source project. The project provides source code to build the responder daemon for a wide range of platforms, including Mac OS 9, Mac OS X, Linux, *BSD, Solaris, VxWorks, and Windows. In addition, Apple provides a user-installable set of services called [Bonjour for Windows] as well as Java libraries. To date, however, only a small number of non-Apple programs, such as Cerulean Studios' Trillian Pro 3, use Bonjour on non-Macintosh platforms.
See also
- Zeroconf
- Universal Plug and Play— provides discovery functionality similar to Bonjour among other things
- Service Location Protocol
- .local
External links
- [Bonjour - Networking, simplified] - General information from Apple
- [Bonjour developer website] - Developer resources from Apple
- [Zeroconf.org] - site with myriad useful links maintained by Stuart Cheshire
- [Hour-long talk] by Stuart Cheshire on Google Video about Bonjour and Zeroconf
- [Stuart Cheshire and Rendezvous mentioned on Daniel Smith's weblog on the O'Reilly Network]
- [Bonjour for Windows] - Bonjour services from Apple for Windows 2000/2003/XP
- [Understanding Zeroconf and Multicast DNS] on the O'Reilly Network - An introduction to zero configuration networking, including a comparison between Bonjour/Zeroconf and Universal Plug 'n' Play
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