[avahi] bonjour ie plugin & avahi (netbios)

[Marc Krochmal]

Hi Chris,

On May 24, 2006, at 4:41 AM, Chris McHarg wrote:

> This isn't strictly about Avahi, but I thought I'd give it a shot  
> here anyway...
>
> I've been working with Avahi on linux machines and using Apple's ie  
> bonjour plugin (on winxp) to browse the published http services.  I  
> noticed that each page access would take relatively long time to  
> return... around 3 secs.
>
> Looking at the packet dump, it seems that windows issues NBNS  
> queries (NetBIOS) for the Avahi published .local hostname, and  
> spends a second or two waiting for replies.
>
> The two ways I can think of to get around this is to either turn off  
> NetBios on the windows side, or maybe run nmbd on the linux side.   
> However, I think both options have problems... turning off NetBios  
> disables windows work group display, etc, and there'd have to be  
> some sort of system for passing the current published .local  
> hostname to nmbd.
>
> Has anyone else got any ideas on this?

This is a known issue with the Bonjour mDNS resolver plugin for  
Windows that we probably can't fix.  The way the Windows NSP  
architecture works is that when a name lookup is requested, Windows  
passes the name to all the plugins so they can take action as  
necessary.  In the case of dot-local name lookups, the mDNS plugin  
gets called which issues the mDNS query and it usually gets the  
response within a few milliseconds, and then it passes its results  
back up to Windows.  However, Windows doesn't pass these results back  
to the client application until the Windows built-in DNS resolver has  
timed out, which normally takes around 2 seconds.

So unfortunately, I don't know of any way to get around this, but now  
that you mention it, I wonder if this delay is caused by NetBIOS  
queries, and not by DNS queries.

-Marc