MacOS – Bonjour visibility dropping over ethernet only

Lots of possible problems, from configuration issues on Blue to security filters in the router to other more obscure things. Some more information will help pinpoint the problem.

• Does Blue have File Sharing turned on? If not, then that's the problem.

• What happens when, on Red, using Finder->Go->Connect to Server... you try to connect to afp://Blue.local

• What happens when, on Red, using Finder->Go->Connect to Server... you try to connect to smb://Blue.local

• What version of OS X is Orange running?

• Is Orange using a wired Ethernet connection to connect to the router or is it using WiFi as well?

Your computers should be accessible as computer-name.local, e.g. Kens-Computer.local or something like that, so depending on what you're trying to do, you might be able to just use that name rather than the IP.

So you can just type vnc://Kens-Computer.local in the 'Connect to' window. You can see the computer's network name if you go to the Sharing preference pane in System Preferences. It's at the top of the page, with a message like "Computers on your local network can access your computer at: Kens-Computer.local"

Make sure you include the ".local" suffix to get the Bonjour IP, otherwise your DNS look-up might auto-append some other hostname suffix (depending on your network/DHCP configuration) or simply fail to find the right host.

If you really want to get the IP though, here's a couple of options:

Bonjour / dns-sd

You can use Bonjour directly via commands like the DNS Service Discovery tool (dns-sd). Try the following in the Terminal application:

% dns-sd -q computer-name
DATE: ---Tue 09 Oct 2012---
18:13:39.209  ...STARTING...
Timestamp     A/R Flags if Name                             T   C Rdata
18:13:39.210  Add     2  4 Computer-Name.local.             1   1 10.1.1.141

The dns-sd tool can do quite a bit, e.g. if you want to list all local VNC services (at least the ones advertised via Bonjour). VNC services are advertised as "_rfb" in mDNS/Bonjour:

% dns-sd -B _rfb local

Ping

Or you can just ping it, which will show the IP in the output (and is just using Bonjour/mDNS to find the IP).

% ping computer-name.local
PING computer-name.local (10.1.1.141): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 10.1.1.141: icmp_seq=0 ttl=64 time=0.066 ms