Comment 24 for bug 624043

Hi. I might be way off here, but I had the same problem with Fedora 17 (most recent at time of comment posting), RHEL 6.2, and CentOS 6.2.

I have to restart "avahi-daemon.service" and or "avahi-daemon.socket" with systemctl or service every couple of minutes in order for iMac machines on the network to discover the AFP server automatically in their finder window. If they restart their machines, come out of standby, sleep or I restart the server then we have to restart this process on the server for them to be able to find the server for a short while again.

My solution was to do all of the following. Probably the 1st that helped the most.

1: Very over the top port opening for avahi, netatalk protocols
---------------------------------------------------------------
Notice the UDP and TCP lines.

548 = AFP over TCP
5353 = Multicast DNS
5354 = Multicast DNS Responder IPC

# AFP / Netatalk / Apple Talk Protocol for Trilogy
#
-A INPUT -p tcp -m state -m tcp --dport 548 --state NEW -j ACCEPT
-A INPUT -p udp -m state -m udp --dport 548 --state NEW -j ACCEPT
#
-A INPUT -p tcp -m state -m tcp --dport 5353 --state NEW -j ACCEPT
-A INPUT -p udp -m state -m udp --dport 5353 --state NEW -j ACCEPT
#
-A INPUT -p tcp -m state -m tcp --dport 5354 --state NEW -j ACCEPT
-A INPUT -p udp -m state -m udp --dport 5354 --state NEW -j ACCEPT

2: Change the following line in the /etc/nsswitch.conf
------------------------------------------------------

#hosts: files mdns4_minimal [NOTFOUND=return] dns mdns4 mdns myhostname
hosts: files mdns4_minimal dns mdns4 mdns

3. Stoped the samba and nmb services
------------------------------------

4. Add the below to rc.local (which needs to be created on some distro's)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
sleep 15
/etc/rc.d/avahi-daemon stop
/etc/rc.d/avahi-daemon start

Hope this helps someone, drove me almost crazy.

Regards
Rory