Documentation of Wide-Area Bonjour Support

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This post is from the WWDC26 Networking Q&A.

Is there any current documentation of Wide-Area Bonjour support in macOS? While the system-level defaults still seem to be the same, in the past there were bugs in the various HMAC and other authentication mechanisms for dynamic updates.

Is there a source for current documentation?

Answered by DTS Engineer in 891895022

I’m not aware of any definitive user- or admin-facing docs about WAB. Honestly, I suspect this isn’t an accident, in that WAB is rarely deployed. Regardless, the path forward is clear: If you want better docs, you should file an enhancement request for those docs.

IMPORTANT Don’t file your ER against the developer documentation, because such information would come from the customer-facing docs folks.

Share and Enjoy
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Quinn “The Eskimo!” @ Developer Technical Support @ Apple
let myEmail = "eskimo" + "1" + "@" + "apple.com"

Answer 1

DTS Engineer OP

Apple

1h

Recommended

I’m not aware of any definitive user- or admin-facing docs about WAB. Honestly, I suspect this isn’t an accident, in that WAB is rarely deployed. Regardless, the path forward is clear: If you want better docs, you should file an enhancement request for those docs.

IMPORTANT Don’t file your ER against the developer documentation, because such information would come from the customer-facing docs folks.

Share and Enjoy
—
Quinn “The Eskimo!” @ Developer Technical Support @ Apple
let myEmail = "eskimo" + "1" + "@" + "apple.com"

Answer 2

Technology Evangelist OP

Apple

14m

Wide-Area (unicast) Bonjour was introduced in Mac OS X 10.4, but never got much adoption. Recently it has started to see new life, with unicast Bonjour being used for service discovery in Thread networks, using some new refinements called Discovery Proxy (RFC 8766) and Service Registration Protocol (RFC 9665). SRP uses SIG(0) public keys instead of TSIG. There is also talk of bringing Discovery Proxy and SRP to Wi-Fi networks, to reduce Wi-Fi multicast traffic load. So the original Wide-Area Bonjour is not widely used, but the underlying technology still powers related features. That said, as far as we know, all of that code should still be working, so please describe here what problems you are seeing (or file bug reports) and we will look into it.