Unpleasant Rendezvous

If you happen to have destroyed two wireless routers in the past year, and plug in your backup router only to discover that

1. it tends to choke on more than one simultaneous HTTP request
2. it gives out bogus DNS server data to your iPhone, leading it to only work with mail and maps

...and then resignedly head over to the Apple Store to purchase an AirPort Extreme, and take it home, unpack it, plug it in, install the AirPort software, find your not-yet-configured AirPort base station, and click Continue, only to be greeted by the message "Reading base station configuration" that never goes away, and start to kick your furniture and consider angrily returning your base station to the Apple Store...

...please consider that you may have turned off Bonjour.

I did so after the revelation that mDNSResponder is an insecure piece of shit, but I didn't realize that my Mac would try to communicate with my AirPort Express solely through Bonjour. Once I turned it back on, life was good again.