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Snow Leopard and mDNSResponder, finally a turn-off

Well. I’ve hunted long and hard for a soft turn-off to the mDNSResponder in OS X broadcasting all sorts of junk all over the place . . . I use ARD for a bunch of stuff (camera raw updates, remotely helping students and faculty who have a problem in the digital lab, debugging printserver errors, updating the systems, etc.)  However, I hate that screen-sharing is broadcasted throughout the building’s network showing up as a list of computers on any Leopard/SnowLeopard computer that is on the same network. Well, with Snow Leopard, the option to turn off broadcasting without actually killing the mDNSResponder daemon is here. For anyone who has SSH or ARD (please note, ARD needs to have legacy VNC turned off and only local admin user for authent to keep it secure + required encryption.) this is a nice little security upgrade. Instructions below:

Open /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.mDNSResponder.plist in Text Wrangler or via CO with VIM or your editor of choice.
Add <string>-NoMulticastAdvertisements</string> at the end of the ProgramArguments array.
Save.
Restart mDNSResponder or restart computer:
sudo launchctl unload /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.mDNSResponder.plist
sudo launchctl load /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.mDNSResponder.plist
This also helps battery life on laptops with ssh/ard or any other service that is enabled and constantly sending pings all around the network every few seconds.

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