[avahi] Avahi Stops Advertising My New Service...

[Andrew W. Donoho]

Folks,

	I am defining a new service for Avahi to vend to the network. It starts up and all of the parameters are correct and it can be found by my custom software and by "Bonjour Browser". But then Avahi stops advertising the service in about 5 minutes. This is running a "stock" Fedora 11 on VMware on a Mac. To simplify the configuration, I've given the linux image a static IP address and it is bridged onto my local network. Internet access is working properly. SSH, _ssh._tcp, as delivered by Fedora, also suffers from this problem.

	Below is as much data as I know how to dig up about Avahi's status. I, of course, can perform any system experiments any of you might desire to get more data about this problem. I am confused and would appreciate your help. Thanks in advance.

Anon,
Andrew

P.S. I have already submitted these service identifiers, _rest._tcp and _rest-http._tcp, to the DNS-SD registry. (These are named similarly to my submissions made in an earlier life, _ws._tcp, _soap._tcp and _upnp._tcp.) Since I'm now using REST services, I believe they need their own identifier.

____________________________________
Andrew W. Donoho
Donoho Design Group, L.L.C.
awd at DDG.com, +1 (512) 750-7596

Knowing is not enough; we must apply. 
    Willing is not enough; we must do.
        -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe


Using avahi-daemon 0.6.25

Here are the two services:

<?xml version="1.0" standalone='no'?><!--*-nxml-*-->
<!DOCTYPE service-group SYSTEM "avahi-service.dtd">

<service-group>
  <name replace-wildcards="yes">%h</name>
  <service>
    <type>_ssh._tcp</type>
    <port>22</port>
  </service>
</service-group>


<?xml version="1.0" standalone='no'?><!--*-nxml-*-->
<!DOCTYPE service-group SYSTEM "avahi-service.dtd">

<service-group>
  <name replace-wildcards="no">weLost</name>
  <service>
    <type>_rest._tcp</type>
    <port>3000</port>
    <txt-record>txtvers=1</txt-record>
  </service>
</service-group>



Here is the result of ip addr:

1: lo: <LOOPBACK,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 16436 qdisc noqueue state UNKNOWN 
    link/loopback 00:00:00:00:00:00 brd 00:00:00:00:00:00
    inet 127.0.0.1/8 scope host lo
    inet6 ::1/128 scope host 
       valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever
2: eth0: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 1500 qdisc pfifo_fast state UNKNOWN qlen 1000
    link/ether 00:0c:29:bb:87:5d brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
    inet 192.168.1.126/24 brd 192.168.1.255 scope global eth0
    inet6 fe80::20c:29ff:febb:875d/64 scope link 
       valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever
3: pan0: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST> mtu 1500 qdisc noop state DOWN 
    link/ether e6:db:70:18:3c:07 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff

And here are the pertinent lines from the Fedora messages log:

Nov 22 13:36:36 Ghost avahi-daemon[1439]: Got SIGTERM, quitting.
Nov 22 13:36:36 Ghost avahi-daemon[1439]: Leaving mDNS multicast group on interface eth0.IPv4 with address 192.168.1.126.
Nov 22 13:36:37 Ghost avahi-daemon[30528]: Found user 'avahi' (UID 497) and group 'avahi' (GID 489).
Nov 22 13:36:37 Ghost avahi-daemon[30528]: Successfully dropped root privileges.
Nov 22 13:36:37 Ghost avahi-daemon[30528]: avahi-daemon 0.6.25 starting up.
Nov 22 13:36:37 Ghost avahi-daemon[30528]: WARNING: No NSS support for mDNS detected, consider installing nss-mdns!
Nov 22 13:36:37 Ghost avahi-daemon[30528]: Successfully called chroot().
Nov 22 13:36:37 Ghost avahi-daemon[30528]: Successfully dropped remaining capabilities.
Nov 22 13:36:37 Ghost avahi-daemon[30528]: Loading service file /services/rest.service.
Nov 22 13:36:37 Ghost avahi-daemon[30528]: Loading service file /services/ssh.service.
Nov 22 13:36:37 Ghost avahi-daemon[30528]: Joining mDNS multicast group on interface eth0.IPv4 with address 192.168.1.126.
Nov 22 13:36:37 Ghost avahi-daemon[30528]: New relevant interface eth0.IPv4 for mDNS.
Nov 22 13:36:37 Ghost avahi-daemon[30528]: Network interface enumeration completed.
Nov 22 13:36:37 Ghost avahi-daemon[30528]: Registering new address record for fe80::20c:29ff:febb:875d on eth0.*.
Nov 22 13:36:37 Ghost avahi-daemon[30528]: Registering new address record for 192.168.1.126 on eth0.IPv4.
Nov 22 13:36:37 Ghost avahi-daemon[30528]: Registering HINFO record with values 'I686'/'LINUX'.
Nov 22 13:36:37 Ghost avahi-daemon[30528]: Server startup complete. Host name is Ghost.local. Local service cookie is 1953088544.
Nov 22 13:36:38 Ghost avahi-daemon[30528]: Service "Ghost" (/services/ssh.service) successfully established.
Nov 22 13:36:38 Ghost avahi-daemon[30528]: Service "weLost" (/services/rest.service) successfully established.