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Hack 29 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/RendezvousBeaconl.
It incorporates all of the functionality of
mDNSProxyResponder inside a simple,
well-organized interface (Figure 3-24).

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.

You can advertise any service you like by supplying the appropriate
Service Type and Port Number. For example, to advertise an
iTunes DAAP share, use
_daap._tcp. as the
Service Type, and 3689 as the
port number. The little triangle button to the right of these fields
provides a cheat sheet for common services and ports.

To make Rendezvous Beacon run whenever you are using your machine,
simply add it to your Login Items in
System Preferences. If you are interested in
advertising Rendezvous services, I highly recommend trying out this
nifty free app.

Another quick and easy method for advertising web pages with
Rendezvous is to use
mod_proxy
, part of the Apache
installation on every OS X box. Add an entry like the following to
your /private/etc/httpd/httpd.conf:

<IfModule mod_rendezvous_apple.c>
RegisterResource "Muzik on Caligula" "/Music/"
</IfModule>

This registers a path with the given description for your local
machine. Restart Apache by clicking Stop and then Start under
System Preferences Sharing
Personal Web Sharing.
Unfortunately, mod_rendezvous
doesn't support proxy like the previous method does,
but it can make it easy to publish local paths without any additional
software.