Wireless Hacks

Advertising Arbitrary Rendezvous Services in OS X

Rendezvous isn’t just for web pages and iChat. Use this OS X app to advertise whatever you like.

While you can certainly use mDNSProxyResponder [Hack #28] to advertise arbitrary Rendezvous services from the command line, OS X has a number of pretty Aqua apps that will also do this for you. My favorite is a freeware app called Rendezvous Beacon, available at http://www.chaoticsoftware.com/ProductPages/RendezvousBeacon.html. It incorporates all of the functionality of mDNSProxyResponder inside a simple, well-organized interface (Figure 3-24).

Figure 3-24. Rendezvous Beacon’s main screen.

Turing beacons on and off is as simple as clicking a checkbox. You can add as many beacons as you like, to whatever service, protocol, and port you need. Like mDNSProxyResponder, it will even allow you to advertise services that aren’t local to your machine or network, as shown in Figure 3-25. In this example, I’m advertising the NoCat web site as the local multicast DNS name nocat.local. This causes any Rendezvous-enabled browsers on the local wireless network (such as Safari or Camino) to see a service called NoCat, which directs them to the IP address shown in Figure 3-25. You can change the URL that the user lands on by changing the Path= line in the Text Record box.

Figure 3-25. Advertise Rendezvous services that reside on other networks entirely. ...