[X4U] Bonjour too chatty?

[Joe Sporleder]

I'm the tech manager for a publishing company. We own a small radio station too. As we upgrade to new equipment at the publishing office, I refurbish our older Macintosh computers to be Internet/communications machines for the personnel at the radio station. Our station engineer's main job is a tech manager for a small college and takes care of our station's tech needs on a contract employee basis. I take care of all of the Mac stuff, and he takes care of the Windows PCs used for management and production at the station, plus anything dealing with the transmitters, control boards and other radio station specific technology. I recent incident with a dying Linksys router - my colleague claims that Bonjour's excessive chattiness exposed the problem with the old router - it caused the old router to "bleed" bonjour traffic onto our ISP's network (the radio station is using a wireless WiMAX setup for Internet access).

He also says that Bonjour is way too chatty and causes management and performance headaches, especially on larger networks like one might find at a college campus. Is his beef with Bonjour legitimate? He claims it is hard to turn off because it is so ambiguous with a lot of Apple's software (like iTunes), and printers that support  Bonjour networking.

Here is a snippet of an email message he sent:
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I am very frustrated with Apple right now, to the point of being pissed off.  The “Bonjour” service is just one of many things that upsets me with Apple.  We have had to go so far as to put all of our printers on a separate network, so the Apples won’t be able to print to unauthorized printers.  This of course means that instead of 5 seconds, it now takes anywhere from 1 to 4 minutes to send a 2 page document to my printer, since it has to go through a network authorization process now.  We had people “being funny”… and sending obscene images to printers in the library and the chapel, with no way to trace who did it, since “Bonjour” happily set it up to print directly to the networked printers, rather than through the print server.  We also had unauthorized people print to our expensive large-format color printer, making “Free” posters for personal use.  We also are under federal mandate to do everything possible stop file sharing of copyrighted materials, which is damn near impossible when every copy of iTunes on the block will happily search for, find, and offer to copy any music, movie, or photo files it finds anywhere on campus.

I also have Macs that we use for video editors with Final Cut Pro.  That is ALL they are supposed to do, but Apple will no longer allow me to permanently remove any of their “Features” like iTunes, iPhoto, Safari, Garage Band, and several other crap applications that I do not need or want on these machines.  I had the old Macs set up how I wanted them, but on the new ones, when I delete features and applications, they are put back on EVERY update.  Even when I delete them as administrator, they are downloaded and reinstalled every time a new user logs in. Apple insists this is necessary to maintain their “Mac User Experience”.  I think it is crap, and I don’t want a “user experience”, I want an appliance that edits video.
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As you can tell, this "colleague" comes from mostly a Windows world.

Joe