Can you use Bonjour for Windows to broadcast a different icon than the Bluescreen?

Had any luck yet?

A Windows system can readily be told to "share" disk volumes or folders to the network, and they then show up when browsing for Windows network services from other computers that know how to browse Windows stuff.

That is similar to Bonjour, but an Apple machine will not "see" it as a Xserver, but it will see it as a Windows file system share. Is that not good enough?

With Bonjour on a Windows machine, you could register a network service that pretended it was an Xserver to the local network, and an Apple machine would see it as such. However, once an actual connection was attempted, it would likely fail.

A real Xserver would normally share its disks as Apple file systems, but a Windows machine does not do that protocol and file system type. So, a Windows machine pretending to be an Xserver would not actually be offering any Apple file system shares.

However, depending on what you are actually trying to accomplish, things may be able to be tweaked. You didn't give enough specifics to describe your goals.

Okay, I get what you're talking about now. And I think there is a partial solution.

So, specifically, from a Mac, in Finder, if you browse for network file shares, it will search for "The WIndows way" of advertising shares, and also for "The Mac way", which is Bonjour. The Finder window will display things that it finds, and will assign an icon based on how it found it and what else it can learn about it.

Thus, ordinary Windows machines that publish shares will show up as an icon representing a kinda generic looking computer monitor, with a substantially blue screen (what you call the BSOD, and probably more than a little bit of humor on their part).

The shares that Finder finds that are from Apple gear will get a different icon --- quite often the exact piece of equipment that is indeed publishing the share. For example an iMac, Mac Pro, laptop, TimeCapsule, etc.

So, what you want (I gather) is for Finder to choose a different icon for some of your shares, by using Bonjour on those machines to advertise itself as being a specific Apple piece of gear.

If I've got this right, then here's what I am able to do in my realm. I've got Bonjour installed on my WinXP machine, such that it has added the Bonjour control panel to the control panels. Exactly which Apple piece I installed which did that is a bit of a mystery, and is talked about in another thread today.

On that control panel is a checkbox to "Advertise shared folders using Bonjour". With that enabled, and actually having a share to begin with (kinda important!), when I browse the network from Finder on my Mac machine, the icon has gloriously changed to look like an iMac.

That may not be ideal, since you wanted an Xserve icon, but we're getting close.

I believe you could get more control by running a persistent instance of the dns-sd program on the Windows machine (with the -R option to register a service), and give it more info about what type of machine to spoof. I'm not sure though, and this would need more experiments.

Cheers,

-Rick

Here's some more info that looks promising:

In Finder, when you ask it to browse the network, it will look for shared filesystems (AFP or SMB), and look for computers that have screen sharing enabled, and who knows what else.

The icons that it displays for what it finds are NOT sent to it.

When it finds services, it will also check to see if that service has a "device info" associated with it. This is done via Bonjour, looking for a _device-info._tcp pseudo service. A lookup for a device info may return a Bonjour TXT record that indicates the model ID of the gizmo. If Finder succeeds in getting this info, then it assigns an icon accordingly, otherwise, it picks a generic icon.

So, a Windows machine that has Bonjour installed, can be told to register and advertise these two records:

_smb._tcp

_device-info._tcp

And, a browsing Mac computer can be coaxed into showing an icon that corresponds to the model ID it obtains.

The TXT record in the _device-info._tcp record looks like this "model=MacPro5,1". I don't know the model ID for an Xserve, but that should be easy to come by.

The only trick left, is how to get these records installed into the mDNSResponder service that runs on the Windows machine that is sharing the folders. The checkbox in the Bonjour control panel will cause the _smb record to exist. One approach to getting the _device-info record to exist, is to fire up an instance of the dns-sd command line utility as a startup service, which lives forever and registers the service. Something like:

dns-sd -R godzilla _device-info._tcp local 1234 model=Xserve1,1

I'll give this a whirl at the office next week, where I've got more Windows and Apple gear around at the same place. (The home is a Windows-free zone)

Cheers,

-Rick