Archive for the 'Networking' CategoryPage 2 of 2

Zero Configuration Networking with Bonjour

Published
by
Mark
on August 7, 2006
in Networking and Video
. 0 Comments

After messing with mt-daapd, I began wondering what all this “mDNS” stuff was about. Turn’s out it’s part of Bonjour, Apple’s zero-conf networking tech. Here’s a cool video that taught me all sorts of stuff: Stuart Cheshire speaks to Google about Bonjour.

One component of zero-conf is Automatic Private IP Addressing, which is so simple you’ll wonder why it wasn’t part of TCP/IP from the start. APIPA is responsible for the typically dreaded 169.254 addresses, which I no longer hate because I finally understand them.

(If you’re too lazy to watch the video, the short story is, “It’s a feature, stupid!” If there’s no DHCP server you do random ARP requests until you find an IP for which there is no response — then you claim it.)

OpenDNS.ocm

Published
by
Mark
on July 10, 2006
in Networking
. 1 Comment

OpenDNS is a free (as in beer) set of DNS servers that anyone can use. It comes with typo correction and some anti-phishing features. I just switched to these at home and did a quick ping www.google.ocm to see if it was working. It worked perfectly, correcting the suffix to “com”.

This should save me a lot of time, given my propensity for fat-fingering URIs.

If you are a bind user, just add this to your named.conf


forwarders {
   // OpenDNS
   208.67.222.222;
   208.67.220.220;
   // Lower priority servers here
};

(via Mark Jeftovic on the EasyDNS blog)

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 United States
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 United States