| 1. | Mac OS X includes support for work based on the IETF's Zeroconf Working Group for Zero Network IP Configuration. The Apple implementation is called Bonjour. Bonjour configures Mac OS X for network support without requiring the user or network administrator to do any configuration. |
| 2. | IP address assignment, naming, and service discovery (browsing) |
| 3. | Link-local addressing allows a computer to self-assign an IP address when the computer is configured to use DHCP but no DHCP server is available. With link-local addressing, a computer randomly selects an address from the 169.254/16 range and checks to make sure no other device is using this address throughout the lifetime of the link. This is referred to as link-local since the address is valid only on the local link, or subnet. |
| 4. | Every Bonjour host contains a small DNS responder. This DNS responder can respond with the service's IP address when it sees another client requesting a lookup of its host name. Whereas a typical DNS lookup is pointed at a single DNS server, Bonjour allows multicast DNS requests that are seen by all Bonjour DNS responders running on the local link. The DNS responder ensures name-to-address lookups happen, despite not having a centrally managed DNS server, as well as when IP addresses change over time. |
| 5. | DNS Service Discovery relies on the DNS capability of doing a key-value lookup. Whereas DNS traditionally uses a domain name key to lookup an IP address value, DNS Service Discovery extends the meaning of key to include a service type and the value to be the service type's name. DNS supports multiple responses, which allows someone looking for a specific type of service to see all services of that type on the local subnet. |
| 6. | The Bonjour name is your link-local multicast DNS host name, which you can use with command-line tools like FTP, ssh, Telnet, and ping, as well as Mac OS X Windows File Sharing. The computer name is the default name that Bonjour uses for DNS Service Discovery. |