How can I remove or disable Bonjour on OSX Lion, is it safe?

Question

I have the only one computer with OSX (wife hates OSX) so I have no other computer to bonjour with. I never needed neither network zero-configuration nor printer sharing or whatever it does. Windows it causes MDNSResponder problems.

How can I remove or disable Bonjour service? Is it safe?

Should we assume you want to uninstall / disable this service on OSX? — bmike, Apr 02 '12 at 14:08
@bmike, nevermind. I should really Google better before asking. — Alex Bolotov, Apr 02 '12 at 15:38

Gerry · Accepted Answer · 2012-04-02T15:16:27.597

6

No you cannot remove Bonjour from MacOS X. There is no real good reason to do so anyway.

Also the "problem" you link to describes an issue with Bonjour installed on Windows 7, so it does not apply to you.

edited Apr 02 '12 at 15:16

answered Apr 02 '12 at 13:05

Gerry

14,551

Alex Bolotov · Answer 2 · 2012-04-02T15:46:31.717

3

As Gerry said it's a bad idea. Just removing mDNSResponder will also break DNS resolver.

However it's possible to disable Bonjour service advertisements. It can be achieved by adding value '-NoMulticastAdvertisements' to the array in the "ProgramArguments" section.

That's well described in Apple knowledge base article and on Charles Edge's site.

edited Apr 02 '12 at 15:46

answered Apr 02 '12 at 15:35

Alex Bolotov

2,481

And how is Bonjour re-enabled: is it simply that the array value changes to "-MulticastAdvertisements" – Phil May 07 '14 at 14:42

How can I remove or disable Bonjour on OSX Lion, is it safe?

2 Answers2