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

[Trent Lloyd]

Andrew,

On 23/11/2009, at 10:01 AM, Andrew W. Donoho wrote:

> 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.


Most likely basically, the machine is not receiving packets on port 5353 multicast.. usually this is caused by faulty wireless drivers that do not speak multicast properly.

The reason they disappear after 5 minutes is that initially when Avahi starts up, it advertises the services manually, over time it backs off and new clients need to be able to request it re-advertise itself, the problem is it never receives the queries and thus never replies.

However, since you are using VMWare on a mac, which works as best I am aware (although I will test again later)... I recommend you check the firewall on Fedora and MacOS.

Regards,
Trent