[avahi] General Avahi usage questions

[Linus Lüssing]

Hi!

I've recently been asking some questions on the irc channel. But
as they got a little longer, I thought it might be better to just
ask them here again:

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hi guys. I was looking for a way to get pidgin/libpurple working
with avahi+ipv6. but then I realised, that I'm lacking some basic
knowledge about avahi :)

first question: I think I remember having the avahi-daemon running
which assigned an ipv4 address on a new alias interface. when does
this happen, when not?
I also found this avahi-ipauto thingy, but it does not seem to be
running for this avahi-ip4ll stuff to assign a 169.254.0.0/16
adress
-169.254.0.0/24 and 169.254.254.0/24 (if I remember right)

2nd question: how can I look up the ip addresses that are assigned
to mylaptop.local (mylaptop should just be the local host name in
/etc/hosts on 127.0.1.1 on a debian system, right?)

3rd question: when exactly is avahi-dnsconfd needed and why? Is my
assupmtion right, that I need this thing, if I want to use
applications that are not utilising avahi (for instance a normal
ping tool) and I want to reach mylaptop.local with that?

4th question: so an application that uses the libavahi can tell
the avahi-daemon to announce a certain service with the specified
port. which ip addresses would/should the avahi-daemon be
announcing then?

5th question: what has to be kept in mind when using avahi with
ipv4+ipv6 or ipv6 only? read this article in the german linux
maganzine  03/06. at the end it is saying that for ipv6 stateless
autoconfiguration, avahi-dnsconfd is necessary. sounds plausible
because of the lack of a dhcp server. but why is this not the case
for avahi with ipv4?
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Cheers, Linus