Bonjour Gateway

Bonjour is a multicast-based discovery protocol (aka mDNS) that is primarily used by Apple and Google devices such as Apple TV, Apple Printers and Google Chromecast. As these devices advertise their services, client devices such as Apple Mac PCs and mobile devices such as iOS and Android phones can discover them using the Bonjour protocol.

Multicast applications such as Bonjour require special consideration when being deployed over wireless networks. Bonjour only works within a single broadcast domain, which is usually a small area. This is by design to prevent flooding a large network with multicast traffic. However, in some situations, a user may want to offer Bonjour services from one VLAN to another.

The Bonjour Gateway feature addresses this requirement by providing an mDNS proxy service configurable from the web interface to allow administrators to specify which types of Bonjour services can be accessed from/to which VLANs.

In order for the Bonjour Gateway to function, the following network configuration requirements must be met:

  • The target networks must be segmented into VLANs.
  • VLANs must be mapped to different WLANs.
  • The controller must be connected to a VLAN trunk port.

Additionally, if the VLANs to be bridged by the gateway are on separate subnets the network has to be configured to route traffic between them.

In this section:

  1. Creating a Bonjour Gateway Service
    The Bonjour Gateway service is essentially a list of rules for mapping services from one VLAN to another. Using the Bonjour Gateway feature, the Unleashed AP serves as the proxy for forwarding Bonjour packets to the designated VLANs.
  2. Deploying a Bonjour Service to an AP
    Once a Bonjour Service has been created, you can select it from any Unleashed AP's configuration page to deploy the Bonjour bridging service from that AP.
Parent topic: Services