I have good and bad news about the integration of Wide Area Bonjour and VPN Activator.

The good news is that I have been able to successfully integrate Wide Area Bonjour into VPN Activator.  AirPrint shared printers are now listed in my VPN connected iPhone 4.

The bad news is that I can’t print to them.  I get an error message telling me that the printer is offline… but it is not.  I tracked the source of the problem to the fact that Wide Area Bonjour is registering my Mac Bonjour services under my AirPort Extre internet IP address… and not under my mac private ip address of “10.0.1.3”.

I did some reasearch and apparently this is how Wide Area Bonjour on OSX is suppose to behave.  You can read the entire thing at http://www.afp548.com/article.php?story=20090225001154457…  but for those with short attention span here is the important part:

In its current state, an OS X client will not register an RFC1918 address with a WAB server. And for those of you about to Google, an RFC1918 address is essentially any private-NAT address. So any IP that starts with 10, 172.16 or 192.168. Yes, that’s correct, it won’t register your IP with the WAB server unless you have a publicly routable address. Really… you read that right. Go ahead and finish the bottle.

So where does this leave us?  Well the dream of leveraging Wide Area Bonjour to advertise Bonjour service across the VPN won’t work due to how OSX register clients IP address…

I will keep looking for other options and hopefully I will find a way to make it work.