can bonjour service be traced or tracked?

Bonjour is the service required for handling various network related services

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To confirm the presence of Bonjour service, open terminal, type the following and press Enter:

ps -ef | grep -i bonjour

You can see the status of the Bonjour service.

The service gets started automatically, so you don't have to worry about its running.

Hi,

If you enable the Finder's Preferences to Display "Servers" in the Shares then other Macs will display as Bonjour will find them.

It is what is called a Zero Configuration service.

As I said the initial step is normally to display other computers in the Finder's Side Bar.
Some Printers and other devices can also use Bonjour.

Older OS versions that have iChat and those that have Messages can have the Bonjour Account activated.

If there are other Computers on the LAN using iChat or Messages with the Bonjour Account active they will appear in your Bonjour Buddy List.

The "Name" they display as is taken from their Address Book (Contacts App) > My Card. You are displayed on their Buddy List as the Name in your My Card.

There can be issues if you have two or more Macs and have always set them up as Your Computer.

That is to say that when setting up the computer you created the first Admin Account as you which names the computer (System Preferences > Sharing) as Nile H's Computer for instance.

It also means that if you stated your Name that the first Card in the Contacts app or Address Book has your Details (the App > Card Menu > Show My Card).

There can be conflict in the Finder if the computers have the same Name and in iChat/Messages if the My Card is the same.

Bonjour is essentially LAN based only.

In fact iChat and Messages take this as far as any Subnet that might have been created. (LANs with two routers get divided into Subnets).

This means Bonjour does not work over the Internet in it's default state (you can create virtual networks to get around this).

8:33 pm Thursday; January 15, 2015

Hi,

There is no server.

If there are Macs on your Network and Bonjour has not been disabled (see OS X: How to disable Bonjour service advertising without disabling DNS - Apple Support) then the Macs will "See" each other.

Most Home LANs would be a routing devices and then several computers.

In these cases the Bonjour data is on port 5353. See TCP and UDP ports used by Apple software products - Apple Support

Other more recent services on your Mac have been added to use this port.

If you happen to have a Server in the set up and are using Messages and the Bonjour account to send info back and forth it could be intercepted.

On the other hand as Bonjour is part of the default set up there would be other data packets just to keep the connection "Live" as it were.

I don't know if there is any encryption involved from the Messages app when using the Bonjour account.

9:25 pm Friday; January 16, 2015