Bonjour64: AFP/Bonjour Fix for 64-bit Snow

Update: A 64-bit R1000 kext has been released!  Click here to get it! Bonjour64 no longer required!! :D

One of the things that has annoyed me greatly this summer has been the lack of AFP/Bonjour support on the onboard NIC on my UD3P under 64-bit Snow Leopard.  The reason behind that is that there is no nice, shiny R1000 kext to fix it like we have for Leopard 10.5.

On a more positive note, the built-in driver actually auto-starts on its own after wake-from-sleep, so at least that’s not a problem anymore.  But I’d still like to access iTunes Sharing and my home AFP server, so here’s an early Halloween treat for you: (instructions are in the readme file)

Bonjour64

Download Bonjour64

The rest of this post is just a nerdy discussion of the solution, feel free to ignore it!

The Problem:

AFP & Bonjour do not work under 64-bit Snow Leopard using the onboard Realtek Gigabit Ethernet port.  The workaround is to enable promiscuous mode using the ifconfig command.  However, this mode is not supported by Apple’s default ifconfig.  Fortunately, a patch has been released which adds support for promiscuous mode (thanks Daniel U. Becker!).

The Solution:

The fix is pretty simple: run the ifconfig command with the promiscuous mode option at every boot (FYI, it survives wake-from-sleep just fine).  scorcho on InsanelyMac posted a great little AppleScript to make this happen.  I took this script and turned it into an Application bundle.  The advantage of turning the script & patch into a bundle is (1) everything is in one nice, neat package, (2) you can add it to your Applications folder via drag-and-drop, and (3) it’s simple to add it to the startup menu.

Additional Notes:

The solution is not as clean as I’d like (i.e. a kext) and requires a one-time initial configuration (see readme in the zip), but it works beautifully.  Special thanks to Mr. Becker for the patch, scorcho for the script, and blackosx for the discussion thread.  Any feedback is appreciated, so please post here in the comments or on the thread as to whether or not it works for you!

Also, if any of you have real coding skills, it’d be nice to make an auto-installer that let you select the active enX adapter & save your password into the script file (it should be pretty easy using a find & replace in Terminal or something, but coding is not my forte at the moment!).  Once the script file is modified, it can be copied from the installer to the Applications folder & auto-added to Login apps.  That would make this a lot more user-friendly!

October 27, 2009 • Posted in: Software

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