• Mac OS X,  Mac Security,  Mass Deployment

    Disabling Bonjour

    Love it or not, some environments insist on disabling Bonjour, Apple’s implementation of Multicast DNS. Despite the fact that mDNS has been around since 2000 and is widely used by Microsoft, we still look to disable this from time to time. As Arek Dreyer mentioned last week at MacSysAdmin in Gothenburg, Sweden, you can’t just disable the mDNSResponder LaunchDaemon or you will bork DNS (my word I think, not his). Instead, to disable Bonjour you would add the -NoMulticastAdvertisements option into the ProgramArguments array in the /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.mDNSResponder.plist file. This can be done manually, or it can be automated with the following command: defaults write /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.mDNSResponder ProgramArguments -array “/usr/sbin/mDNSResponder” “-launchd” “-NoMulticastAdvertisements”…

  • Mac OS X,  Mass Deployment

    LoginHook Bonjour

    Want users to be able to use Bonjour at home without having their systems registering with Bonjour when they’re on your network? Many environments have taken to wholesale disabling Bonjour. This can be done by augmenting the LaunchDaemon that invokes Bonjour, com.apple.mDNSResponder.plist that is located at /System/Library/LaunchDaemons. You add a -NoMulticastAdvertisements to the ProgramArguments array. This can be done with the defaults command as so: defaults write /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.mDNSResponder ProgramArguments -array-add “-NoMulticastAdvertisements” This can then be undone by writing the contents you want back into the array without the -NoMulticastAdvertisements: defaults write /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.mDNSResponder ProgramArguments -array /usr/sbin/mDNSResponder -launchd This is somewhat well documented, initially appearing as an Apple kbase article. However, we…