mDNSResponderHelper

[jarednichols]

Does anyone know what this does? Not mDNSResponder, but mDNSResponderHelper. I haven't been able to find much about it and I'm looking to disable it.

Thanks

j
--
Jared F. Nichols
Desktop Engineer, Client Services
Information Services Department
MIT Lincoln Laboratory
244 Wood Street
Lexington, Massachusetts 02420
781.981.5436

[tlarkin]

in 10.6 it is used for Bonjour, it also is tied to some DNS stuff. You can disable it, but you may want to glance this over

http://developer.apple.com/networking/bonjour/faq.html

[jarednichols]

I probably should have been a little more clear… I know what mDNSResponder does, just not in particular the Helper. I found that by disabling it, it causes our very long offline AD-login problem to go away. Don't know what I'll break by disabling this LaunchDaemon. That's all.

j
--
Jared F. Nichols
Desktop Engineer, Client Services
Information Services Department
MIT Lincoln Laboratory
244 Wood Street
Lexington, Massachusetts 02420
781.981.5436

[tlarkin]

sorry, i should have just used google to find it

http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#DOCUMENTATION/Darwin/Reference/ManPages/man8/mDNSResponderHe...

is all the info I could dig up on it

[bentoms]

We use a script (primarily based on the turn off airport script in the resource kit) at logout for all laptop users.

This stops the issue for us. Another way to resolve is to have your dns externally accesible.

Basically, the ad plugin (with mdnsresponder's help) is trying to locate your domain for authentication.

I'd advise against disabling mdnsresponder as we tried before & some apps wouldn't launch as they required bonjour etc.

[jarednichols]

Turning off airport doesn't help in our case and there's a better chance
of Steve Jobs showing up at my work than us putting our DNS on the
outside. I'm interested in disabling *only* mDNSResponderHelper, *not*
mDNSResponder (which in 10.6 also kills all of DNS).

I've looked at defining the DNS service order and taking mDNS out of that
but haven't hit any luck with that.

j
-- Jared F. Nichols
Desktop Engineer, Client Services
Information Services Department
MIT Lincoln Laboratory
244 Wood Street
Lexington, Massachusetts 02420
781.981.5436

[jarednichols]

Hi-

RE: the privilege separation thing… My cohort here and I were also going down that path of speculation, but where it hangs up for me is that they're both LaunchDaemons. LaunchDaemons run as root. So if it were a matter of one running as root and one not, you would expect to find one in LaunchDaemons and one in LaunchAgents. But, this is not the case. The only other priv-sep that I could think of is if the Helper is masqing as a user for some reason. Why, I have no clue. Best we can find, it doesn't effect anything so we're farming it out to some users to see if it hoses anything in the real world.

RE: Bonjour over the WAN… Bwahahahahahahahaha…. Hahahah…. Hahahaha… </tears> :)

j
--
Jared F. Nichols
Desktop Engineer, Client Services
Information Services Department
MIT Lincoln Laboratory
244 Wood Street
Lexington, Massachusetts 02420
781.981.5436

--missing content--

s with a different permission set. One probably runs as root, and one pro
bably runs as user level, and there is a socket between them. However, th
is is pure speculation on my behalf as I am not a developer and I did not r
ead through the developer pages on mDNSResponder.

There are several articles on enabling Bonjour over your WAN over on www.af
p548.com<http://www.afp548.com> though I am going to assume MIT doesn't wan
t Jared to do that, nor does Jared himself. Again that is also another spe
culation.

Though I am interested to know what you all find out about it, so keep me p
osted. :)

-Tom