OpenWetWare:Software/Network Protocols/Bonjour

Bonjour (software) 241896 151257341 2007-08-14T21:39:52Z Tomasf 1479354 /* Overview */ 

Bonjour, formerly Rendezvous, is Apple Inc.'s trade name for its implementation of Zeroconf, a service discovery protocol used in Apple's Mac OS X operating system from version 10.2 onwards. Intended for use on local area networks, Bonjour uses multicast Domain Name System service records to locate devices such as printers, as well as other computers, and the services that those devices offer.

Overview
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, Adobe Creative Suite 3, Proteus, Adium, Fire, Skype, and the Gizmo Project to find other users on the local network, TiVo Desktop to find digital video recorders and shared media libraries, SubEthaEdit and e to find document collaborators, and Contactizer to find and share contacts, tasks and events 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. Bonjour Browser can be used to view all services declared by these applications and more.

Without special DNS configuration, Bonjour only works within a single broadcast domain, 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 (&quot;advertises&quot;) 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 link. Thus, the only security impact of Bonjour is that advertised services are no longer protected by security through obscurity on the local network. If the services are protected through a means other than obscurity, they will remain protected.

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. Although Bonjour is not required for use of these programs, to date these programs silently install the software such as Adobe Creative Suite 3, iTunes, Cerulean Studios' Trillian Pro 3, Ruckus Music Player from Ruckus Network, and e, a collaborative text editor for Microsoft Windows.

Originally, Bonjour had been released under the controversial Apple Public Source License which caused its adoption to be severely hampered on Linux and other Free Software desktops. This led to the development of the Avahi project under the less controversial LGPL license. Nowadays Avahi is the default Zeroconf implementation on all Linux distributions and has even been ported to Apple's own Mac OS X operating system.

Current implementation on Windows
Bonjour is often installed silently along with certain unrelated applications and the extra ports and services that the program opens can potentially reduce the security and performance of a computer slightly. The program creates a folder called &quot;Bonjour&quot; in the &quot;Program Files&quot; folder of the main hard disk drive without explicit user consent which is why this software is sometimes grouped with malware/potentially unwanted software.

Naming
Bonjour's original name, when introduced in August 2002 as part of Mac OS X v10.2, was &quot;Rendezvous&quot;, similar to the French word rendez-vous for a meeting or get-together. On August 27 2003, Tibco Software Inc announced that it had filed suit for trademark infringement.&lt;ref name=&quot;tibco-pr&quot;&gt;&lt;/ref&gt; Tibco already had an enterprise application integration product called TIBCO Rendezvous on the market since 1994, and the company stated that they had tried and failed to come to an agreement with Apple Computer. In July 2004, Apple Computer and Tibco reached an out-of-court settlement;&lt;ref name=&quot;settlement-appleinsider&quot;&gt;&lt;/ref&gt; specifics of the settlement were not released to the public. It was widely rumored at the time that the new name would be OpenTalk, but this name was not picked (possibly due to the similarities to LocalTalk and PowerTalk). On April 12 2005, Apple announced that Rendezvous was being renamed to Bonjour,&lt;ref name=&quot;rename-applelists&quot;&gt;&lt;/ref&gt; which is also a French word, meaning &quot;hello&quot;, &quot;good morning&quot;, or literally &quot;Good Day&quot;.