[avahi] avahi dropping out

[Lennart Poettering]

On Tue, 06.11.07 10:08, Scott Amort (amorts at queensu.ca) wrote:

> Hello,
> 
> I am using avahi-daemon to advertise a netatalk share from a linux box  
> (the client's are all macs running OS X 10.4.10 or 10.5).  Everything  
> works perfectly for about three to four minutes before the avahi  
> broadcast disappears (i.e. I can still connect directly to the linux  
> box via it's ip address, so netatalk is running fine, but the server  
> no longer shows up in the network list).  If I restart the avahi- 
> daemon, it comes back and works as expected, but eventually disappears  
> again.  Has anyone else experienced this sort of behaviour?  I'm  
> running avahi 0.6.2 on a gentoo box.

Sounds like an issue with multicasting. When the Avahi daemon starts
up it multicasts information of its services to all machines on the
LAN. However, when they are removed from the client's caches, they
seem not to be refreshed anymore. This is most likely the case because
Avahi seems not to be able to receive Multicast traffic, but is able
to send it out.

Reasons might be manifold:

- Firewall
- Broken network driver that cannot do Multicasting (Many WLAN
  drivers, NDIS wrappers cannot do this)
- Broken routers/APs

See FAQ #15.

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering                        Red Hat, Inc.
lennart [at] poettering [dot] net         ICQ# 11060553
http://0pointer.net/lennart/           GnuPG 0x1A015CC4