Apple Bonjour

Bonjour, formerly Rendezvous, is Apple's trade name for its implementation of the IETF Zeroconf protocol - a computer network technology used in Apple's Mac OS X from version 10.2 onwards. It uses standard DNS packets in a new way. Thus it is a new service, but it is using a technology that is relatively old, DNS over IP.

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 setup a network without any configuration. Currently it is used by Mac OS X to find printers and file sharing servers. It is also used by iTunes to find shared music, iPhoto to find shared photos, iChat to find other local iChat users, TiVo Desktop to find digital video recorders, and SubEthaEdit to find document collaborators. Additionally it is used by Safari to find local web servers and configuration pages for local devices.

Without special DNS configuration, Bonjour only works on a single subnet. There seems to be a misperception that a service made available over Bonjour is "on the Internet", or available to the world-wide users of the IP network known as the Internet. This is not true. Services are automatically made available to only the users of a single subnet, be it Ethernet, AirPort, or FireWire IP-based, which usually encompasses a fairly small area.

Rendezvous was renamed Bonjour due to a 2004 settlement between Apple and Tibco Software Inc, as Tibco already market a product with the name Rendezvous.

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