About Bonjour
Nerves_dnssd provides an interface to Apple’s DNS Service Discovery API. DNS Service Discovery enables applications to advertise and discover services both peer to peer on the local network using multicast DNS and over the internet using traditional unicast DNS and if needed NAT-PMP or uPNP for port forwarding.
Bonjour and the DNSSD API are bundled with OS X. On Windows Bonjour is bundled with some Apple applications and is also available standalone in the form of Bonjour Print Services for Windows. The DNSSD API is made available via Bonjour SDK for Windows (free registration required).
On other UNIX like platforms the DNSSD API can be made available via either Apple mDNSResponder or Avahi with it’s optional Bonjour compatibilty layer. The former tends to be more commonly used on BSD and embedded platforms while the later is a mainstay of most Linux desktop operating systems. They are mostly functionally equivalent except in the area of wide-area service discovery where Avahi does not support registering in wide-area domains or DNS-LLQ for real-time updates.
Note: Problems will ensue should multiple daemons be run on one machine.
For further information on the DNS Service Discovery API or Bonjour itself, see [http://developer.apple.com/networking/bonjour].