[avahi] Avahi published service only appears for less than 30 secs after starting daemon

[Lennart Poettering]

On Tue, 05.02.08 12:24, Michael Tyson (mtyson at smartpath.com.au) wrote:

> However, after some small amount of time - approximately 30 seconds - the 
> service disappears; it no longer appears in either app.  The avahi daemon 
> appears to still be running after this - it appears in the process list.
>
> After restarting the daemon, the service reappears again.
>
> As a workaround, I've made a script that restarts the avahi daemon every 30 
> seconds, but that is a less-than-ideal solution =)
>
> After reading reports that proprietary network card drivers can have issues 
> with multicast, I experimented with changing the virtual network device in 
> the VMWare configuration from the default 'vmxnet' - I tried 'e1000', which 
> appears not to be supported by the kernel, and 'vlance', which worked but 
> yielded exactly the same results - no service after approx 30 seconds.
>
> Can anyone suggest a possible path forward?

Uh, this sounds like yet another iteration of FAQ #15, this time
caused be the networking code in VMWare?

Since VMWare is not free software, I don't see how I can help you
fixing this issue, sorry. Try contacting VMWare support.

All I can recommend is checking with one wireshark running inside the
vm and another one outside of the vm if every single packet is
correctly transferred between them. With exponentially increasing time
intervals (i.e. 2s, 4s, ...) the avahi server should be announcing
every service. if that announcement doesn't go through, than it is
vmware's fault.

maybe vmware is running some stupid firewall on the stuff? maybe you
need to play around with "bridging" mode in vmware or so? 

Consider switching to free software. This will introduce you to a
whole lot of new exciting bugs, but at least they are fixable...

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering                        Red Hat, Inc.
lennart [at] poettering [dot] net         ICQ# 11060553
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