Bonjour Gateway

This entry is part 4 of 6 in the series 4 SSIDs 1 Secondary Academy

By comparison to the Domain WiFi setup the configuration for the Apple network is much simpler.

The one tiny little exception is that the Apple Discovery Protocol (Bonjour) is by design unable to traverse VLANs. In many networks this wouldn’t be a problem however we have a item of software called AirServer on our Windows clients that ties into the AirPlay feature on iPads to project the iPad screen onto the PC screen. To get this feature working the Bonjour discovery packets need to move from the Windows VLAN to the Mac VLAN.

So first up the configuration for the SSID on our HP MSM controller-

To get the Bonjour packets to traverse the VLAN we need a ‘Bonjour Gateway’; to get this going I will be using a Virtual Machine with 3 network adapters running Ubuntu Client (if you are confidant with Linux then feel free to use the server edition!) and a bit of software called Avahi.

The guide here – http://community.spiceworks.com/how_to/show/38251-build-your-own-bonjour-gateway shows very well how to setup the Avahi software; in my case I went without the VLANs and just used native NICs sitting in the Server, Windows Clients and Mac Clients VLANs.

A few more details in the screen shots below-

Next up is an article on the BYOD SSID which uses a very cool feature on our Smoothwall firewall to make logins really easy.