Marc, as I understand the hosts line of your nsswitch.conf file is wrong, it's: hosts: files dns and should include the mdns support as in: hosts: files dns mdns Perhaps you'll have to swap 'dns' and 'mdns' to change the resolution order. This line affect the name resolution from outside the avahi daemon so the resolver can query it, I don't know if it affect the avahi daemon itself. Other options are mdns4 (ipv4 only), mdns6 (ipv6 only), mdns_minimal (both v4 and v6), mdns4_minimal (ipv4 only), mdns6_minimal (ipv6 only) I'm using it on an ubuntu installation, I've never used gentoo but it should be the same. Regards, Ernesto.