Comment 5 for bug 1441008

I was re-visiting this recently, I'm fairly sure we can get rid of this requirement to stop avahi with a .local by reconfiguring nsswitch.conf to remove the [NOTFOUND=RETURN].

Do you know where the initial discussion determining why to do this was had?

My general understanding is that because of the [NOTFOUND=RETURN] in nsswitch.conf, if avahi is started then .local domains wont resolve as mdns returns NOTFOUND for any .local then causing the lookup to short circuit and return failed.

If we remove this flag, it should fall through to DNS and work as expected, though possibly with an increased timeout.

Generally mDNS only has single depth hostnames that you lookup via regular dns, e.g. host1.local -- sub.host1.local is generally not allowed by the spec for normal hostnames. In contrast, most .local domains are active directory/windows or other domains where they usually have 3 levels, e.g. host.network.local -- if the timeout is an issue we could very likely fall through on multi label hosts if it's not in the cache.