Mac and Windows not resolving *.local hostnames
Yesterday, after all these holidays, I was trying to get back to working on my game. For developing iOS games I’m using: my laptop with Windows 7, that hosts all code in SVN; and a Mac Mini with Mac Os X, that I basically use to port and test games on iOS. For several months, I had them in separate rooms, because our house has one router in a garage, and each room gets only one Ethernet cable. So yesterday I’ve got another router, setup a mini network in my room and connected laptop and Mac Mini to it. I’ve committed all the code from laptop to SVN, proceeded to check it out on a Mac Mini, and was surprised with a nice “Host sandbox.local not found” (sandbox is a hostname for my laptop).
I’m using Bonjour (which is an implementation of Zeroconf) on Windows to resolve it’s hostname to IP for Mac. It’s a single nice side effect of having iTunes installed. 
Our router has a DHCP service, and since I’m using laptop in a lot of different places I’d hate to mess with “/etc/hosts” and switch to a static IP, or relocate SVN in a Mac Mini to a different IP of my laptop each time I needed to get sources from SVN. It’s so nice just to be able to enter “svn://sandbox.local” for a repository url and see everything magically work. So if you’re struggling with a similar situation, then I advice to look into solving this with Bonjour.
And finally the solution to the problem… since Bonjour uses multicast for it’s service, router also must support it, and it must be enabled. I’m using Linksys BEFSR41, so for me the option was in “Security->Filter->Filter Multicast”, and it simply had to be enabled. The option is also misleading, as it seems that enabling it would actually filter out multicast packets, but it’s backwards. Another name that this might hide behind is IGMP, so if it’s not working, then check related settings too.
