Finding Stuff

From What The Wiki?!

Contents

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Introduction

Many Apple (and other Mac OS X) applications allow you to find stuff shared by other users. This includes:

  • iTunes

Apple's music player (and more) application will look for music shared by others. This works with both the Mac and Windows versions of iTunes. If you want to download this music you need an application like ourtunes [1] which works on os x, linux, *bsd and other OS-ses. (1)

  • iPhoto

Like iTunes, iPhoto looks for photos shared by others. (1)

  • iChat

Apple's instant messaging application allows you to see other iChat users on the local network if you open the Rendezvous or Bonjour window under "Window". The status message is great for telling others where you and so on. (2)

  • AdiumX

Adium is an free open source application based on libgaim supporting much instant messaging protocols. One of them in Bonjour. Just open Preferences, go to the accounts "tab" and add a bonjour account. Don't forget to click the 'signup on startup' checkbox.

  • Web

Safari, Apple's web browser, looks for webservers that announce their presence. This makes it possible to find sites on Macs with "Personal Web Sharing" enabled in the system preferences under "sharing". Put your web pages in the directory "Sites" in your home directory.

  • RSS

NetNewsWire(Lite) is a payware application (the lite version is for free) and it supports rendevous, so you can share all your cool WTH-rss-feeds to the rest.

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Share your stuff!

So before you leave home, enable sharing in iTunes and iPhoto, and fire up iChat, and don't forget to leave them running so we can all share our stuff at What The Hack!

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Details

Apple makes the source for their Multicast DNS responder available at the Bonjour developer site. With this, you can compile your own mDNS responder under BSD or Linux and announce services such as web pages available on the server.

Links:

(1) Go to the preferences for iTunes/iPhoto and enable sharing for either your entire music/photo library or selected playlists/photo collections.

(2) Go to the iChat preferences, then "accounts" and select rendezvous or bonjour, then set up your preferences, including whether others can see your email and/or AIM name.

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Wide area bonjour

For those of you who run MacOS X Tiger and like to experiment, there is also "wide area bonjour". This works by registering the service information in a regular DNS zone using dynamic updates. For those of you how aren't DNS admins, the "dynamic update" mechanism allows a client system (such as my Powerbook) to update information on the DNS server.

If you want to experiment with this, go to the Configuring clients to use Wide-Area Bonjour page and download the Bonjour preference pane. (Disclaimer: download executables from unknown websites at your own risk.) Install it by doubleclicking. (You may want to install it for just one user so it can't screw up the entire system.)

Then, you need to enter three things:

  1. A hostname (including domain) that will be registered in the DNS (green = success, yellow = temporary failure, red = permanent failure)
  2. A domain where your system registers its services
  3. One or more domains that your system searches for available services

I've set up the domain bonjour.muada.nl for this. So you can select a hostname in this domain, such as "host.bonjour.muada.nl" and enter "bonjour.muada.nl" under 2. and 3. Note that this means my server allows dynamic updates without authentication, so I may remove this experimental service at any time when it creates trouble.

If you have a domain where others have already registered services, list it below so we can add it to our "browsing" lists. However, it doesn't work very well if everyone has their personal domain.

If the WTH organization wants to open up dynamic updates to the/a WTH (sub)domain, so much the better!

Note that most services will register in wide area bonjour, but not iTunes or iChat, those only work on the local subnet. The easiest way to see if all of this works is with bonjour in Safari, which looks for "personal web sharing" on remote systems.

Hpromatem 14:36, 5 Jul 2005 (CEST)

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