The process that makes Bonjour work is mDNSResponder, located in /usr/sbin. /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.mDNSResponder.plist invokes mDNSResponder on boot. One of the easiest ways to troubleshoot issues you think are related to Bonjour is to temporarily disable the mDNSResponder: launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.mDNSResponder.plist To enable it: launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.mDNSResponder.plist In addition to basic starting and stopping of the mDNSResponder, when troubleshooting any service, one should always look at logs. Log events are logged to the standard syslog facility and so are available via Console. These are locate at /var/log/system.log. Searching for mDNSResponder errors in system.log can also be done from the command line using: cat /var/log/system.log | grep mDNSResponder Or interactively so…
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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”…