Hello guys,
I believe we all are looking forward to the release of the new GA V2R5 version for our WLAN devices. As you probably heard or tested your own, this new version comes bearing gifts. Starting form V2R5 our ACs will supports new supported features like IPv6, NAT, Bonjour protocol, IPSec, 802.11ac and so on.
I tested myself or met in practice some of the new features and I can say they look nice but what I want to point out here is this Bonjour protocol which I think is pretty awesome, in particular for the apple users.
For those who didn’t hear about bonjour before, is apple’s proposal for zero-configuration networking over ip and is based on Multicast Domain Name System and DNS-based Service Discovery. Zero-configuration networking is widely used in residential wireless and enterprise office networks. This solution allows network devices to automatically obtain IP addresses, resolve domain names, and discover services.
Bonjour implemens only intra-VLAN service discovery. To implement service discovery across VLANs, Huawei proposes the Bonjour gateway. The Bonjour gateway records a list of all available printing and Airplay services, and responds to service requests of Bonjour terminals so that the terminals can discover services across VLANs and network segments.
What I want to do with this post is to encourage you to use this option because I saw it how it works and I tested it myself
The configuration is pretty simple:
You have to run the mdns gateway enable command to enable bonjour gateway on the device.
After you enable it, the bonjour gateway will maintain service lists for all service provisioning devices. A service list records the service name, service type, TTL, host name, and IP address. When a apple product multicasts an MDNS request packet to query required service the Bonjour gateway searches its service lists and sends the host name and IP address of the device that can provide the required service to that terminal. Then the connection can be established between the terminals.
Other useful command can be the mdns probe interval [interval] that has to be run in the vlan view. This command enables the the gateway to periodically discover services at the specified time interval.
If you don’t believe it works, after you configure these two commands, you can check the service lists by using the display mdns service all command and the result would be similar to mine:
<AC6605>dis mdns service all
MDNS Service Info:
Service name : Bogdan's iPhone._device-info._tcp.local
TXT Info:
Data Length : 12
You can read more about our bonjour gateway in our product documentation and probably you will adopt it in your network very soon.
