Using Bonjour in SMB Environment

[cashman]

Hello!

I have recently been hearing that using many Bonjour printers in a SMB or larger office is not best practice, but I haven't been explained why. Does anyone have any insight?

We have roughly 15+ Bonjour printers (Konica Minolta MFPs, printers, and copiers) in our current environment before adding JAMF. We have not added the printer to Self-Service yet since we have not had any incentive. If Bonjour is not best practice and there are proven reasons why, we would definitely make the switch.

Thank you in advance!

[Nix4Life · Accepted solution]

@ccashman

Bonjour and Multicast DNS(MDNS) are considered very "chatty" and advertise themselves to ANYONE and EVERYONE on the network. I'm currently in a K-12 and we got tired of students printing stuff to teacher's offices because of this advertisement. We have been LPD/IPP/HP Socket since 10.6.8. So in our environment this would be bad. If the company doesn't mind that anyone on the network can add any printer at anytime and it works for you

C'est la vie

L

[cashman]

@LSinNY

Appreciate the response! Makes total sense how it can cause a lot of unnecessary chattiness on the network.

Would some side affects be slowness in printing, lost connections to printers, etc?

[CapU]

Its not all chat all the time. They advertise the service but each time it advertises there is a longer interval in between and the packet isn't that big

[Nix4Life]

@CapU That's good to hear, i know apple was looking to improve on it, but i have had a bad taste in enterprise since it was called Rendezvous

[benshawuk]

It's also worth mentioning that Bonjour doesn't work across subnets (at least not without fairly in depth network configuration).

[AVmcclint]

AppleTalk was called chatty by network engineers because every AppleTalk device would broadcast "Hey everyone! It's me! Here's my services!" and repeat every few seconds whether anyone asked for it or not. It was a great way to find stuff on your network via the Chooser. Bonjour (aka Rendezvous) is slightly less chatty. Now devices sit silent and wait for a user app to broadcast to the network "Hey! Who is there and what are your services?" Then every device on the network that hears it will respond. I use Bonjour Browser to explore my network from my Mac. There is an iOS version called Discovery.

In my experience, there are difficulties in getting printers to automatically choose their print drivers over Bonjour unless. AppleTalk took care of that far more reliably.

As @LSinNY mentioned, Bonjour has no controls for limiting access. It is really designed for home or small businesses where everyone is one big happy family and it's ok to print where you want to. In an Enterprise or Educational environment, it's a different story. You could theoretically break up your network into Faculty subnets and Student subnets so Bonjour traffic couldn't spill over. Otherwise you'd be better off serving all your printers from a central print server that can control who can access it and then disable Bonjour on each printer so the users can't access the admin interface unless they have the IP and password.