Version 3 (modified by sebest, 8 years ago)

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Avahi for the Users

Screenshot

Everybody loves screenshots:

 http://www.freedesktop.org/~lennart/avahi-disocvery-ng.png

(This shows a debugging tool which makes direct use of the Avahi mDNS stack for browsing every available DNS-SD service on all local networks)

Software Making use of Avahi

FAQ

  • Is it OK to run multiple mDNS responders on the same machine?
    • No, it is not OK. Sooner or later some mDNS features known as "Known Answer Suppression" and "Unicast Reply" (and probably some more) will result in problems if more than one responder runs on the same machine.
  • May I enable the mDNS reflector on multiple hosts accessing the same two networks?
    • No, don't do that. Queries will be looped, and sooner or later your network will be stalled with mDNS traffic.
  • Avahi doesn't work, it doesn't register or find any services and doesn't resolve mDNS host names'''
    • Make sure:
      • That you run a recent Kernel (both 2.4 and 2.6 should work) with IP Multicasting enabled
      • That you run only one mDNS stack
      • That you disabled all local firewalls (This includes disabling the Firestarter default FW), at least for UDP traffic from and to port 5353
  • Does avahi run on non-Linux operating systems?
    • Avahi 0.5.2 runs on Linux only, however Avahi SVN (targetted to 0.6) now has a preliminary, working port to FreeBSD, NetBSD and Darwin (MacOSX), and Solaris is currently being worked on.
  • Blah, you fools, glib is bloat and sucks'''
    • Avahi doesn't depend on glib. Yet it comes with a glib event loop adapter. Use --disable-gtk to disable building it.
  • Blah, you fools, DBUS is bloat and sucks'''
    • Then Avahi is not for you, sorry. As it seems we think a little different about DBUS than you do.
  • Why did you implement yet another free mDNS stack? Apple released their code under a free license'''
    • The "freeness" of the license Apple used is questionnable, e.g. the Debian project decided to not include code under APSL. In addition we consider our code superior to Apple's in many aspects. In case you want to flame us on this topic, our email address is /dev/null.
  • Will Avahi work with a GUI and/or X/GNOME/KDE?
    • - Yes, while Avahi is most often usefull in a GUI with some kind of program, actual use of its libraries are in no way tied to X, GNOME, KDE or any other kind of GUI. The screenshot we show here is simply of a tool which displays services on the network (It's really just a demonstration). One example is that you can use the static service files (/etc/avahi/services/) to advertise some services on a head-less machine, e.g. a WEB or FTP server.

Documentation

You can read the documentation online: