OK, I'm trying to set up a bonjour connection between two computers on my school's network. If I know the IP of one, I can SSH through. Normaly, I would be happy with that, but my school has one of the worst networks I've ever seen. Dynamic IPs, no intelligible system for the hostname, and I can't get them to give me a static IP. From what I can tell, bonjour would be the perfect solution for this problem.

Problem is: I don't know anything about bonjour.

Question: is there a GUI I could use to get myself started, or a really good guide.

My setup is: Desktop running Debian Lenny / MacBook running OSX Tiger

Any help/shots in the dark/flames would be really appreciated.

Bonjour is Apple's re-branding/implementation of the zeroconf set of protocols.

Prompted by your question, I just found that you can if you have the right package installed, zeroconf will be used to resolve ip addresses if you append .local on the machine name (in Ubuntu, the package is called libnss-mdns). This just saved me a lot of time because two of the machines on my network don't have fixed IP addresses, and I have had to fiddle in the past to get the right address

e.g. These will use zeroconf to lookup the hostnames "bob" and "conny":

yes, I know. but can I get my question answered?

problem is, my machine name changes (oddly enough to someone else's name, as in First_Last) when I connect to the network.

You come to a Linux forum using Apple-specific terminology for a more general technology, claiming you know nothing about it - it seems reasonable to conclude that you didn't know the Linux name for it. In this case it is useful information to tell you - giving you a search term to plug into your package manager to see what programs relate to it.

There was nothing in your original post which suggested you didn't know the name of the remote machine, just the IP address. The OP suggests you need to translate from name to IP, and I told you how.

There are a couple of ZeroConf service browsers available. There's a small tool called avahi-discover, and you can also find integrated zerconf browsing built in to konqueror if you use KDE. Just type zeroconf:/ into the location bar in konqueror.