Tagged “zeroconf”

Bonjour, mes amis! January 2012
Apple's Bonjour service just saved me a lot of hassle.

I took a little time this MLK Day to get some old electronics ready for sale. One of the machines I decided to clean up was an old Mac Pro. I've recently replaced it with a Mac mini that positively sips power: 10 - 12 watts at idle instead of the consistent 120 watts that my old Mac Pro would draw. (I'll write more on cutting my setup's power consumption in a later blog post.)

I hooked my Mac Pro up to my router with an Ethernet cable but didn't want to get out a keyboard, mouse, and monitor to do a final set of backups and deauthorize some software. Normally this wouldn't be a problem since the old Mac Pro was set configured to start Apple Remote Desktop at boot.

I forgot that since switching to the Mac Pro, I had reassigned the Mac Pro's IP address (192.168.0.150) to the Mac mini. The Mac Pro booted, but could not get a proper IP address since the address it was configured to use was in use.

I was about to break out my keyboard, mouse, and monitor when I thought I'd give Bonjour a try.