[avahi] Avahi not working on SuSE Linux 10.1

[John Calcote]

I can't get Avahi to work.

I played with the avahi packages on SuSE 10.1 last night for about 4 hours. 

During this time, I discovered that SuSE also has the mDNS package from Apple installed by default and running on their distro. The reason is that they are heading toward zero-effort configuration of services using Zeroconf services.

I managed to disable mdnsd and related packages and services. Then I started up avahi-daemon and avahi-dnsconfd.

I have a single printer on my subnet that I can see with Bonjour browser extensions in IE on my windows box. I could not for the life of me get avahi-browse to find that service (_http._tcp). I also tried advertising a service manually with avahi-publish-service and couldn't see that one either.

I've disabled my firewalls on both my linux and windows machines (just for the test), and enabled multicast routing on my linux box with a route add line for 224.0.0.0. Nothing...

I also ran ethereal against my linux box to monitor the mdns multicast traffic - I see nothing on the wire except my ssh traffic.

Finally, I disabled avahi services and reenabled mdnsd, and viola - it works - I could see my printer, and I could publish a web service and see both the service and the printer using mDNSClient.

What gives? Is there something special I need to know to make avahi work on SuSE 10.1?

Thanks in advance,
John

-----
John Calcote (jcalcote at novell.com)
Sr. Software Engineeer
Novell, Inc.

-------------- next part --------------
BEGIN:VCARD
VERSION:2.1
X-GWTYPE:USER
FN:John Calcote
TEL;WORK:1-801-861-7517
ORG:;Unified Identity System Eng TE
TEL;PREF;FAX:801/861-2292
EMAIL;WORK;PREF;NGW:JCALCOTE at novell.com
N:Calcote;John;;Sr. Software Engineer
TITLE:Sr. Software Engineer
ADR;DOM;WORK;PARCEL;POSTAL:;PRV-H-511;;Provo
LABEL;DOM;WORK;PARCEL;POSTAL;ENCODING=QUOTED-PRINTABLE:John Calcote=0A=
PRV-H-511=0A=
Provo
END:VCARD