Networking & Wireless | News

Bonjour Gateway To Make Services Available Across Subnets

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 03/26/12

Aerohive Networks has begun showing off a new bit of technology that's expected to help organizations--including those in higher education--enable users with Apple devices to exploit other resources on their networks. The Bonjour Gateway will make Apple services such as AirPrint and AirPlay usable across subnets. The company said the gateway product is expected to be available for beta trials in the second quarter of 2012 and will ship mid-year. It will be delivered as a software upgrade for existing customers or as a separate device to work on legacy wired or wireless networks from Aerohive or other companies.

The release is an important one for education environments, which struggle to integrate a growing number of Apple devices into existing Windows-powered networks. Apple's Bonjour is a service advertisement and configuration technology. Matthew Gast, Aerohive's director of product management, notes in a video demonstration of the new gateway that Bonjour isn't a service itself; it's "like a phonebook for services on the network. It says, 'Here's a printer'; 'Here's a file server...'"

But Apple chose ease of use over other considerations when it designed Bonjour. It's fast and simple to set up in a home or classroom environment that has a single subnet. The user doesn't need to understand IP address configuration to get devices "talking" to each other. It's less useful in networks that have more than a single subnet.

Bonjour Gateway overcomes that limitation by advertising services that may exist across subnets, simplifying the deployment of Apple devices into existing networks without having to change the current network topology.

For example, a college that has separate student and faculty-staff networks may need to cross those LAN borders in order to use equipment residing on the network with authentication by way of devices such as an iPad that's accessing the Internet on the student or public Wi-Fi.

The Bonjour Gateway also does filtering, giving network administrators the ability to expose only those services such as printers or file servers that he or she wishes to advertise.

Aerohive has put together a blog entry and video demo at blogs.aerohive.com and a technology brief at aerohive.com.