[avahi] avahi-daemon with Bonjour clients

[Gavin Panella]

On 12 Jul 2007, at 00:23, Lennart Poettering wrote:

> fOn Sun, 01.07.07 20:10, Douglas Choma (doug at nakediron.com) wrote:
>
>> I can't seem to figure out one small detail of getting this to work.
>> I'm running a Linux box with Avahi (daemon only).  And the rest of
>> the network is running OS X (10.4.10).
>>
>> I already have a working volume shared on the Linux machine using the
>> netatalk package.  I have no problem seeing all of the machines in
>> the Finder (including trauma, the Linux box).  But if I click on
>> "connect" for the Linux machine, I get the error "Connection
>> Failed".  I know that it's a problem with the Mac resolving the IP
>> address for trauma.local; because I can put the Linux server in my
>> hosts file and it fixes the problem.
>>
>> Isn't Avahi supposed to be providing the IP address for
>> trauma.local?  Apparently the other Macs are providing that
>> information because they all connect to one another.  I've read all
>> the documentation I could find, and just can't seem to figure this
>> out.  I'd like to avoid adding the server/ip to everyone's hosts file
>> as that seems to negate the simplicity of the mDNS system.
>>
>> If it's of any help, I've tried both the native packages (avahi-
>> daemon and netatalk) from Debian etch.  And I've also tried my own
>> versions compiled from source with the same results.
>
> Does resolving the hostname of the Debian machine from one of the
> MacOSX machine with a tool like "ping" work?
>
> Does resolving the local host name on the Linux machine work?
> (requires an installation of nss-mdns)
>
> Do you have some kind of firewall running?
>
> Or maybe some bug network driver (many WLAN drivers are borked when it
> comes to multicasting)? Try setting the +allmuti or +promisc flag.
>
> If all this doesn't help please create a network dump with tcpdump or
> wireshark and capture all udp traffic on port 5353, and send it to me!

I've had a similar problem with a machine (called masaq) this week.  
Services were being discovered from other hosts on the network (a  
Linux box and a few Macs), but the address of masaq was not being  
resolved, and masaq could see nothing.

Eventually I noticed (with Wireshark) that multicast was being  
transmitted fine from masaq, but no multicast was ever reaching it.  
Plugging masaq's NIC into a different switch resolved it. The problem  
resurfaced when I plugged masaq back into the HomePlug (Devolo dLAN  
Highspeed) adapter that it had previously been connected to.

Now that I've seen the symptoms I could probably spot this problem  
sooner next time, but could anything be done automatically (when  
Avahi starts perhaps) to begin diagnosis of problems with multicast?

Gavin.