Widearea Bonjour

I had always been very interested in using Apple's TTFNAR beyond the local subnet, as it is really a great technology. Stuart Cheshire pointed me to dns-sd.org which has a good article on setting up your own Bonjour DNS Server.

However, some questions remain unanswered on the site, so this is my attempt to prepare a little FAQ compiled from some questions and answers from the Bonjour mailing list.

Q: Do I need special hardware to use DNS-SD?
A: Yes, you need a router which supports a port mapping protocol (UPnP). Most newer gateways do, I will try to list some examples

Q: When I check the resolution of my bonjour server (e.g. `dig bonjour.example.com`), everything looks fine but I do not get an answer section:
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 1, ADDITIONAL: 0
A: That is OK. You don't really need to have an address record for your Bonjour domain. As long as you have an NS record for the domain, mDNSResponder will know where to send the updates

Q: I think I have set up everything correctly, but I still can not register services with my server from the Bonjour Preference Pane. What am I doing wrong?
A: Check the console. You may find somethink like:
Jun 16 12:27:51 Tigerbook mDNSResponder: ERROR: mDNS_SetSecretForZone - could not convert shared secret **************** from base64
This can mean that the password actually was saved as a series of stars (a bug in the current version of the pane). Re-enter your password and try again.