bonjour incompatible with vpn client?

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Level 1

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bonjour incompatible with vpn client?

I am setting up a new imac for my wife.

her office is still windows based, so I am trying out vmware fusion as a solution for her.

to connect to her office, she uses a browser based vpn product, Juniper networks network connect. It works fine from the xp sp2 virtual machine, but as soon as I installed bonjour to share the printer hooked up to the imac with the virtual machine, the connection stopped working.

we keep getting disconnected and the error message indicates changes to the routing table. I uninstalled bonjour and everything is fine.

for now I am going to enable the usb connection and have the virtual machine attach to the printer, but bonjour was a much more elegant solution.

if there is a fix or change to network parameters i need to make, I would greatly appreciate the guidance.

thanks

imac, Mac OS X (10.5.1)

Posted on Jan 27, 2008 6:48 AM

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Answer 1

Henry B.

Level 9

78,731 points

Jan 28, 2008 4:13 PM in response to richtw

This problem is common to many (most?) VPN software clients, which is that you can either (a) use the client to access a remote network, or (b) you can access services (like a shared network printer) on your local network - but you are not allowed to do both at the same time.

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Answer 2

Mar 5, 2008 6:45 PM in response to richtw

This is a little late in coming, but I only just encountered this issue myself.

What you ran into is not the common issue with VPN client software denying access to both the remote network and the local one at the same time. That affects all local network services regardless of whether Bonjour for Windows is installed or not.

Juniper VPN typically monitors for routing changes that would indicate the user's end of the VPN tunnel is accessible to insecure, unknown, foreign clients. If that kind of hanky-panky is detected, Juniper Network Connect disconnects. Since Bonjour creates route changes as it attempts to advertise itself and seek other Bonjour-enabled devices, it is not long before Network Connect folds up.

Your choices are, disable/dump Bonjour, or ask your Juniper VPN administrator to turn off some desirable security features (good luck with that!).

There was a short March 1 discussion of the topic on the Juniper user forum, here:
http://www.juniperforum.com/index.php?action=profile;u=5150;sa=showPosts

I see this only with Windows clients, not with OS X Macs using Juniper VPN -- and frankly, I don't know of a reason for the difference there...

HTH/jc

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Answer 3

Mar 15, 2008 10:21 PM in response to Jeffrey Clayton

Does iTunes still function normally without the Bonjour software? If so why do they use it?

Thanks for your help.

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Answer 4

Mar 22, 2008 2:28 PM in response to Frank Barron

Au revoir to bonjour...
I have been running iTunes on windows xp for a while now with no problems. Several months ago iTunes suddenly started freezing up when I would quit. It would just get stuck. If a song was playing it kept on playing. The only way to get it to quit was to hit Ctrl AltDelete force it to end now. I tried reinstalling iTunes and repairing iTunes. Nothing.
I ran msconfig and found that bonjour service was the culprit. I removed bonjour from the computer and everything works fine now. iTunes works great without bonjour, in fact it works better. Say au revior to bonjour.

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