[avahi] using Avahi in unaware applications

[Norman Ramsey]

 > Please note that this line requires nss-mdns 0.8 to
 > work. Unfortunately, Debian unstable is still at 0.7. 
 > 
 > The Debian maintainer seems to be vanished without a trace. 

I feel your pain---same thing happened to me.
I eventually started packaging it myself on my own Debian repository. 

 > > But unfortunately, many applications appear not to use the glibc NSS
 > > functionality: neither curl, nor ssh, nor firefox see
 > > 'toller.local'.
 > 
 > Works fine here. 

I'll try 0.8 and let you know how it goes.

 > > Even worse, I must have my system configured badly (no cacheing?),
 > > because the time required to look up a *nonlocal* host is appalling...
 > 
 > Hmm, have you added .local to /etc/resolv.conf? If so every non-local
 > host name is first resolved with .local appended on mDNS. non-existing
 > mDNS hostnames will always cause the query to time out.

No; resolv.conf looks like this:

  search eecs.harvard.edu
  nameserver 192.168.2.1

 > host(1) doesn't use any local cache. It uses unicast DNS, bypassing
 > NSS or anything.

Probably my wireless router is cacheing DNS records.

 > mDNS and unicast DNS are related but not really compatible. Such a
 > "link" between mDNS and unicast DNS would definitely be hack and
 > probably not worth the effort.

Fair enough.  If both the functionality and performance problems are
resolved in libnss-mdns 0.8, that will be great!


Norman