Wide Area Bonjour Network

[MacDonaldsd]

Hi,

Me and a few of my friends want to collaborate on a project and I was wondering if we could connect to each other using bonjour ?

We are all using a mac running leopard, but I can't find any easy way of doing it.

 

[Consultant]

What you might be thinking about is actually connect with iChat to the computer that has the project opened, and Share screen?

 

[MacDonaldsd]

iChat via AIM is a bit buggy for us, the screen sharing doesn't always work, which is strange because the video chat always does.

 

[tyr2]

You can use Network Beacon to create a bonjour proxy to create a bridge between different bonjour networks.

 

[MacDonaldsd]

You can use Network Beacon to create a bonjour proxy to create a bridge between different bonjour networks.

How would I go about setting that up ? The application has no documentation so I am a bit confused.

 

[MacsRgr8]

In short, there is no very easy way to configure Bonjour across subnets.

You'll have to setup some sort of mDNS Server where both computers can communicate with as a "Bonjour" server, like in Leopard Server's DNS server.
Or use something like iChat which uses online accounts.

Maybe something like Google Docs can help you out..?

 

[tyr2]

Personally I'm not that clear on Network Beacon I just heard that people had used it previously.

I did once get a bonjour network going with hosts being able to connect from anywhere using OpenVPN on a third host.

I.e. Client Machine 1 -> VPN -> OpenVPN Host
And Client Machine 2 -> VPN -> OpenVPN Host

You must use a TAP based VPN (rather than a TUN network) as the multicast Bonjour packets are not forwarded by OpenVPN on a TUN network.

You should then configure the server mode to be 'server-bridge'. For example

server-bridge 192.168.5.1 255.255.255.0 192.168.5.30 192.168.5.40

This creates a VPN with 192.168.5.1 as the VPN server and each host joining the network gets an address in the 192.168.5.30-40 range.

Bonjour packets route fine over this network and I successfully used it to listen to my remote iTunes shares.

Every host you want to connect to the virtual bonjour network will need to join the VPN. I was using TunnelBlink to manage the VPN on the OS X clients.

 

[Littleodie914]

If your project involves collaboration on any text documents, you might want to give SubEthaEdit a try.