[avahi] Resolve Local Hostnames using Aavhi

[John Frankish]

> > On 22/05/2011 18:08, John Frankish wrote:
> > I have a simple network using a cisco rvs4000 as a router and dhcp server.
> > Unfortunately, the rvs4000 does not have an option to resolve local
> > hostnames and I don't really want to leave a machine on 24h/day running
> > dnsmasq as a dhcp/dns server.
> >
> > Is there a way to use avahi to resolve local hostnames and to assign
> > hostnames to devices (ps3, internet radio, iphone) using their mac address? I
> > can see the information is there from avahi-browse, but I don't seem to be
> > able to get at it:
> >
> > $ sudo ping -c2 dslkayak [this is not the local machine]
> > ping: bad address 'dslkayak'
> >
> > $ sudo ping -c2 dslkayak.local
> > ping: bad address 'dslkayak.local'
> >
> > $ avahi-resolve -n dslkayak.local
> > dslkayak.local  192.168.1.100
> >
> > $ cat /etc/nsswitch.conf
> > hosts:      files mdns4_minimal [NOTFOUND=return] dns
> >
> Hi John,
> 
> I believe you need the following line in /etc/nsswitch.conf :
> 
> hosts:      files mdns4_minimal [NOTFOUND=return] dns mdns4
> 
> as described in the Documentation section at
> http://0pointer.de/lennart/projects/nss-mdns/
> 
> Even though it says mdns4_minimal resolves .local addresses, it also says it
> resolves only IPV4LL addresses (169.254.x.x), which to me sounds like it
> doesn't resolve addresses from the private IPv4 range..
> 
> Don't know if it's just not formulated well or if that's really the case. I'd give it
> a shot though.
> 
Thanks.

Indeed, the nss-mdns documentation does say that (I'd been looking at the avahi documentation).

However, when I change nsswitch to:
files mdns4_minimal [NOTFOUND=return] dns mdns4
or even
files mdns4 [NOTFOUND=return] dns

The situation remains the same, i.e. avahi-resolve can find a machine by hostname, but ping cannot.