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Rendezvous

Rendezvous is Apple's trade name for its implementation of the IETF Zeroconf protocol - a computer network technology used in Apple's Mac OS X from version 10.2 onwards. It uses standard DNS packets in a new way. Thus it is a new service, but it is using a technology that is relatively old, DNS over IP.

It is used for iTunes to find music shares among different computers via networks. It is also used by iChat to find other iChat users on the LAN.

Without special DNS configuration, Rendezvous only works on a single subnet. There seems to be a misperception that a service made available over Rendezvous is "on the Internet", or available to the world-wide users of the IP network known as the Internet. This is not true. Services are automatically made available to only the users of a single ethernet network, which usually encompasses a fairly small area.

The term "rendezvous" is also known as a synchronization strategy for message exchange of machines and persons.

Programss are not the only ones that synchronize at certain points. An aspect of life is that contacts and lovely datess happen all day.

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Rendezvous is also a system call of Plan 9.