[avahi] Newbie's General Questions

[David Li]

Hi,

I am new to DNS-SD. Our project has several constraints: We have a
cluster of Centos7-based servers and our network doesn't support
multicast. We can only use existing DHCP/DNS BIND9 infrastructure
which does Dynamic DNS update - meaning when a new host comes online,
DHCP assigns a IP and host name, it also updates DNS with a new record
(A/PTR).

We have several types of applications that their instances are spread
across servers in our cluster. Our basic requirements is for one type
of app to query the DNS server to obtain a list of running instances
of another type of app that can provide services that this app will
need.  Our app is NOT a web browser type.


This seems to leave us with very few options. I have been searching on
the net for DNS-SD solution. There are not many examples  and so far
haven't been able to find all the answers. I am aware of Apples's
DNS-SD (www. dns-sd.org) and Boujour implementation. But I haven't'
seen an example of its being used in a Linux cluster. Plus BIND9
doesn't support LLQ and UL.

I like Avahi except for the fact I may have to use mDNS which our
network doesn't support at this time. So my questions are:

1. Is it possible for Avahi to work with a BIND9 DNS server for
wide-area based DNS service discovery?
2. If I have to manually add SRV records for a service to my DNS
server, how can a host use Avahi client to query and discover the
service instances?
3. Can a client running Avahi automatically register its service with
DNS server?

Hopefully I asked the right questions and experts here can point me to
the info I need. If not, please feel free to suggest other options.

Thanks.

David