Bonjour Login vs IP Login (command-k)

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Bonjour Login vs IP Login (command-k)

Our file server is 10.4.3 w/ 2GB RAM. Our clients are all G5s running 10.4.3.

I'm wondering if something is up w/ out network config. We are a small subnet on a large corp network, and lately (since 10.4.3) I have noticed a new issue, though it has been easy to work around.
Clients on the main network crash when they attemp to connect via Binjour browsing (Via the Network area of the Finder windows) but connect fine via Command-K and the IP address.
We have a second private network, (the metadata network for our Xsan) that only 2 machines use, and on this network Bojour works fine, in fact our transfer speeds are about 30% higher when we connect via Bonjour vs IP...
I'd love to get that 30% boost for my other clients, so I'm wondering if anybody has any suggestions on network configs for getting Bonjour to behave. I think it has soemthing to do w/ DNS, as previously we have seen some DNS/Bonjour related freak outs involving the mDNSresponder process when the servers have lost access tot he main corp DNS...

any ideas???

Posted on Dec 15, 2005 11:04 AM

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Answer 1

Dec 18, 2005 4:32 AM in response to Chris Keath

Bonjour use IP too. Depending on your setup, subnets and such, you either have a DHCP server or use static IPs for the Xsan. I guess it might work having self assigned IP's (like 169.xxx.xxx.xxx) but I would use "real" IP's.

Bonjour use multicasts to find/present nodes/services on your LANs but if you use something like fileserver.local to mount an AFP server volume it still use TCP port 548 for that traffic.

I guess you could have some routing problems, re-using the same network numbers on more than one subnet, overlapping netmasks or some other network related problem.

That 30% speed increase must be from mounting the Xsan volume directly via FibreChannel on those computers since the metadata network only transports metadata (filelocking and such) not the actual data.

And Apple doesn't support IP over FibreChannel (yet?) so a Xsan volume is either mounted directly as a shared disc (mounting the same disc on 2 or more computers as a local volume but using the "Xsan" filesystem) or as a re-shared volume via AFP/SMB/NFS.

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