Wondering how to advertise Apple Mac hostnames to linux using appletalk
 

Hi All,
Just started at the very beginning, trying to find out how i can get hostnames of apple computers on the network that are all DHCP and not on DNS, so can't use static address but of course the apple clients are using rendezvous/bonjour apple talk protocol stuff and i'd like to know how i can go about getting linux tapped into that protocol so that the linux box can use hostname's of the apple clients to connect to them and not have to use DNS etc. Perhaps it requires a means of automatically keeping its own DNS where some linux service keeps a tally of the movement of DHCP address and is still able to tap into the correct client using the hostname as the DNS gets updated constantly to every change detected?

I see there are various how too's about advertising services from linux to the apple mac's but this is not what i am trying to do. I also see some things mentioned about the howl service and APF (OR maybe t was AFP??).

Has anyone achieved similar things?

Cheers,
MJ

Hi.

The rendezvous/bonjour system on Linux is called Avahi. There should be a startup service called 'avahi-daemon' which switches it on.
I's be surprised if AppleTalk was involved at all - it's been a lot of years since I saw a Mac with AppleTalk switched on (it's off by default in OSX).

Dave

Hello,
Thanks for the reply... well i don't know alot about Mac stuff, therefore your probably right, but i'll certainly look at avahi, thanks for the tip

Cheers,
MJ

Hi All,
Is it possible to get to stage where you can do something like:-
Where hostname is a apple mac computer only advertising its hostname with bonjour. Because i've briefly looked about at several different applications that say they can work with bonjour... ie.... avahi, KDE's version, apple's own mDNSresponder version for linux. Avahi i found more or less impossible with no real documentation as far as i understood anyway. Not really understanding what really needed to be installed so i would be able to do such things as ping [hostname], especially as it talks more about needing API's and stuff. Apple's own mDNSresponder which includes as i understood nss-dns etc etc installed fine, but i don't really see that working either.

However i should mention with avahi if i run the 'avahi-discover-standalone', it does discover and see different hosts and stuff, so it is sort of working. But i want to be able to use the hostnames of these hosts just as you would if they were held in DNS or /etc/hosts.

Is that possible?

Cheers,
MJ

I believe you can (though I've not tried it myself). nss-mdns should let any application resolve names through zeroconf if your /etc/nsswitch.conf is set up right.

http://0pointer.de/lennart/projects/nss-mdns/

Dave