[avahi] Publishing CNAMEs

[Phil Endecott]

Dear Experts,

I'm investigating how to make a local web server accessible via
multiple names - for example, a home NAS box that can be reached
by HTTP as photos.local, music.local, movies.local etc. With a
traditional DNS I would give the server a name (e.g. "server")
and then CNAMEs for photos, music, movies. Then I'd configure
the web server to serve those different "virtual hosts" from
different directories.

But how do I do that with multicast DNS?

I note that there is a dnssd module for Apache which publishes
virtual hosts via Avahi, but I think that is publishing services,
not CNAMEs; so an mDNS browser could find those services, but
it's not sufficient to allow a client to type "photos.local" into
a web browser address bar. (And I'm not using Apache.)

I have found a few github projects that get Avahi to publish CNAMEs
using the python dbus bindings (I think). Is this what I need?
Example: https://github.com/alticelabs/mdns-publisher

I note that Avahi has built-in support to publish A records and
services described in configuration files and using the
avahi-publish utility, but apparently no equivalent for CNAMEs.
Is this by design? Is doing this a bad idea in any way?


Thanks,

Phil.