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Avahi for the Users

Screenshots

On the Avahi Walk of Fame you can get a glimpse on what Avahi can do for you.

Software Making use of Avahi

The below list contains applications that are using Avahi in one way or another. Tho it is still quite incomplete. If you think there's an application that should be added to this, no matter whether it supports Avahi natively or via Avahi's excellent compatibility layer, do not hesitate to add this particular application to the below list!

Or even better - If you do have some neat screen shots about an application that runs against Avahi, you may consider to add your shots to the Avahi Walk of Fame.

•  Rhythmbox
•  KDE (see list of applications)
•  VideoLAN Client
•  Service Discovery Applet  source v0.3.1
•  Vino Vnc server 2.13.5 or newer
•  Ekiga 2.0 or newer (formerly Gnomemeeting)
• There is a distcc patch flying  around
• CVS versions of  gnome-vfs contain native Avahi support
•  Banshee 0.10.4 or newer
•  WzdFTPD
•  nss-mdns is a NSS plugin to resolve hostnames using mdns.
•  cyphesis is a WorldForge? server (?)
•  Epiphany supports Avahi in some way because it uses gnomevfs's DNS-SD API which in turn supports Avahi natively
•  Apache 2.0 through  mod_dnssd
• There is a zope patch flying  around
• There is a mt-daapd patch flying  around
• And an updated mt-daapd patch for avahi 0.6  here
• Add your application here

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 Linux 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
    • That you don't use a crappy NDISWrapper driver or proprietary WLAN driver that doesn't support multicasting properly
• Does avahi run on non-Linux operating systems?
  • Avahi 0.6 runs on Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD and Darwin/MacOSX. Avahi SVN has some preliminary support for OpenBSD and OpenSolaris?. You're welcome to help porting!
• 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 useful 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 man pages online:

• avahi-daemon(8)
• avahi-daemon.conf(5)
• avahi.service(5)
• avahi.hosts(5)
• avahi-dnsconfd(8)
• avahi-dnsconfd.action(8)
• avahi-browse(1)
• avahi-publish(1)
• avahi-resolve(1)
• avahi-discover(1)
• avahi-bookmarks(1)

Troubleshooting

Some wifi cards using proprietary or ndiswrapper drivers may not work. The following cards require specific customisation:

• Linksys (lsbcmnds ndiswrapper driver) - not working. Occasionally seen in Avahi browser when avahi-daemon is restarted, but queries soon timeout. Unable to see other machines. Note - iwconfig notes that "Warning: Driver for device wlan0 recommend version 18 of Wireless Extension, but has been compiled with version 17, therefore some driver features may not be available..."