I have a headless remote Mini in which I was hoping to reduce bandwidth consumption by following an Apple knowledge base note (Mac OS X v10.6: Disabling mDNSResponder will disable DNS) which is a method to stop Bonjour service advertisement.
Now I can't connect to the Mini via SSH, screen sharing, sftp, smtp or anything else. I know the Mini is alive, I can ping/traceroute it.
Any thoughts?
Mac OS X (10.6.4)
i guess the ssh service is disabled...
mDNSResponder is a daemon that OS X uses for resolve DNS from reverse look ups. Disabling it is not a good idea if you wish DNS to still function.
Please re-read the tech note. It gives a method for leaving mDNSResponder functional but it stops Bonjour from advertising services.
In the meanwhile, I've learned that the mini is hanging during bootup and it seems to be unrelated to mDNSResponder.
I took the mini to the Genius Bar and after confirming that the hard drive was ok, they reinstalled the OS and all seems ok now. I was then able to disable Bonjour service advertising again without any problems.
I have no idea what happened but I suspect when I rebooted after the first attempt at shutting off advertising some critical boot file got damaged.