Jimmy's weblog

I’ve spent the last couple of days testing the latest Fedora Core 4 release (FC4 test 2) on both x86 and PPC platforms. Overall it seems to be pretty solid for a test release though I have noticed some problems with Winbind continually dropping its Active Directory authentication channel.

Starting with FC3, the Fedora team have included support for the Technology Formerly Known As Rendezvous (and now known as Bonjour). Bonjour allows automatic discovery of network services and computers without requiring IP address or DNS configuration.

In practice, that means you can plug a Bonjour-compliant device (for example a printer) in to a network and connect to it without having to specify any network settings. Bonjour does this by requiring that compliant devices are able to:

• allocate IP addresses without a DHCP server
• translate between names and IP addresses without a DNS server
• locate or advertise services without using a directory server

The default configuration for Bonjour only makes these devices available on your local subnet, so you don’t have to worry about them being available from anywhere on the Internet.

Fedora uses howl / mDNSResponder for its implementation of Bonjour and configuration requires only two steps - adding the services to the mDNSResponder configuration file and starting the mDNSResponder daemon itself. The example below configures Fedora to advertise AFP (Netatalk), SSH / SFTP, HTTP and SMB (Samba) via Bounjour.

Step 1 - Edit /etc/howl/mDNSResponder.conf and add the following lines:

"[hostname] AFP" _afpovertcp._tcp local. 548
"[hostname] SSH" _ssh._tcp local. 22
"[hostname] HTTP" _http._tcp local. 80
"[hostname] SMB" _smb._tcp local. 445

Step 2 – Start mDNSResponder and set it to start automatically at boot:

service mDNSResponder start
chkconfig mDNSResponder --level 2345 on

Your server will now automatically be visible to Bonour-aware applications (including iTerm, Safari and Cyberduck) and manually reachable at [hostname].local for computers on your local subnet. Under OSX, your AFP server will be viewable in the Finder at Network » Local.

Update: If you’re using a firewall then you will also want to make sure you allow incoming connections from your local subnet to port 5353 UDP and TCP. Under Fedora, add the following lines to your /etc/sysconfig/iptables file:

-A INPUT -p tcp -s [subnet]/[subnet mask] --dport 5353 -j ACCEPT
-A INPUT -p udp -s [subnet]/[subnet mask] --dport 5353 -j ACCEPT