[ErichG]

I was interested to discover people discussing wide area bonjour – thought I’d just chime in with my two cents.

I have bind9 up and running with a dynamic zone delegated under my primary.

I can report that if you manage to get past the key generation and enter FQDNs in the first two fields, AND you are behind a compliant NAT (if you are behind a NAT) – that the clients will register A records and their services (other than iTunes – as a matter of policy, I gather). And it really is pretty sexy feeling to be able to browse services under a unicast domain where ever you happen to be – i.e. connecting to machines behind NAT via the Jaadu vnc client on my iTouch.

Meanwhile – if you are behind a bad NAT (read Linksys or any industrial grade NAT/Firewall) things get really ugly, especially if you try to throw lots of clients into the mix. On the Linksys the router does establish the route when it gets the UPnP command, but fails to properly report the handle back to the client… the result is that if you have a bunch of clients, they all try to get routes for their local port (i.e. 22 for ssh), and the first one to the party gets the route – but doesn’t know it got the route… even so – it registers it’s a record, and the service record it asked for, so whichever machine got the to the party first gets the requests, no matter which A record you try to connect to… if you follow that, lol. This seems like a giant bug in apple’s system right now. I’ve had great luck with most other consumer routers – and the Timecapsule here at the house is a dream – my powerbook starts backing up to it wherever I happen to be, for example.

I have yet to get the currently distributed dnsextd (POSIX version) running properly on my Ubuntu distro (generates errors I don’t recall) – and come up with compile link errors when I try to compile the current trunk…. haven’t tracked that yet.

Meanwhile – I’m trying to circumvent the router problem (oh how I love linksys) by connecting to my remote server using OpenVPN and rerouting all my traffic. So far – I can’t get the Wide Area client to use the foreign IP as it’s registration IP, even though all the named requests are shown in the log as coming from the remote addy and everything else (i.e. web browsing) seems to flow correctly. This is a non-bridged set up in the server, btw.

My impression is that, at least on the POSIX side of the world, apple is in no rush to let third parties in on their little .mac parade – which is a disaster as I understand it.

If anyone else is pursuing this stuff, I’d be interested in chatting.

Best,
E

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