Ubuntu
avahi package

Avahi behaves badly where there is a unicast .local-domain.

Bug #83468 reported by Ulrik Mikaelsson on 2007-02-05

Affects

Status

Importance

Assigned to

Milestone

avahi (Ubuntu)

Fix Released

High

Martin Pitt

Ubuntu ubuntu-7.04

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Affecting:	avahi (Ubuntu)
Filed here by:	Ulrik Mikaelsson
When:	2007-02-05
Confirmed:	2007-02-27
Assigned:	2007-02-27
Started work:	2007-02-27
Completed:	2007-03-08

Target

Distribution
Package	(Find…)
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Status	Importance	Milestone
	High	Ubuntu ubuntu-7.04

Assigned to

	Me
	Martin Pitt (pitti)

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Bug Description

My ISP provides a .local-domain in their DNS config. The only thing i've been able to find, is a ".local" A-record that points to 127.0.0.1. Silly, I know, but ISP:s can be like that.

This gives me some head-ache in regards to Avahi. Whenever I login, avahi (or possibly the service-discovery-applet) sends out a popup, telling me that a previous unicast .local domain was discovered, that this was bad, and that Avahi disabled itself.

Fair enough, I can live with that I have to fiddle with it, set up my own caching NS when my ISP don't do it right, etc. However if I don't deal with the situation, (I.E. own caching NS) an hour so later, the message pops up again. I suspect it's got something to do with DHCP lease timeouts, triggering something. I think a less understanding user would have a problem with this.

What I would like to happen instead; (2 alternatives)
A) Avahi handles the situation, and tries to use both the mDNS .local-domain and the pre-existing .local-domain. Sure, it might imply some hard-to-troubleshoot conflicts, but in most cases it'd probably work as expected.

B) Avahi detecting the problem, telling me about it as it does now, offering me a link where I can find more information, as well as a good argumentation to throw at my ISP, and a "shut up" option, that makes the popup go away and stay gone.

Add tags Tag help

Trent Lloyd (lathiat) wrote on 2007-02-05:

I can confirm this constantly pops up for me, in my case it happened every 10 seconds or so while at the sydney air port en route linux.conf.au 2007

C de-Avillez (hggdh2) wrote on 2007-02-06:

a question here: would it be an option to rename the default domain avahi-daemon uses to register? By default it gets to be .local (see /etc/avahi/avahi-daemon.conf).

This also bothered me, even more because the surge on '.local' started after Microsoft suggested its use for internal address spaces (if I remember correctly, at the time of w2k).

But, after I renamed the avahi domain, I did not have problems anymore.

I still think the default domain should be something different -- like, for example, 'avahi-local'.

Trent Lloyd (lathiat) wrote on 2007-02-06:

You could do this but this won't affect all the other mDNS clients on the network that will use .local by default

FYI: http://www.avahi.org/wiki/AvahiAndUnicastDotLocal

Mårten Woxberg (maxmc) wrote on 2007-02-20:

I've Deselected the checkbox in the general section of the network-settings applet
And still! I get this message each time on login (which is quite alot since I run both windows and fiesty)

I even tried to set my own domain but that didn't help at all.

Trent Lloyd (lathiat) wrote on 2007-02-20:

This is *not* caused by DHCP releases simply being renewed I have tested this just now (with both NetworkManager and a standard ifup)

I can think only possibly it might happen if you got a new IP every lease every few seconds but this seems silly as everything else would drop out also

In short: not 100% sure what is causing this issue ATM.

Marten -- Are you in a position to reproduce this? Can you tell me if your IP changes each time this happens?

Changed in avahi:
importance:	Undecided → High

Trent Lloyd (lathiat) wrote on 2007-02-20:

patch to disable .local checking if /etc/default/avahi-daemon says its not to be started Edit (598 bytes, text/plain)

Possibly makes sense to apply this patch also to disable this function if Avahi is already disabled.

Although perhaps we should still check if Avahi is stopped in this case (in case it was started manually) but not send an alert, or perhaps it makes sense not to do a popup notify at all

also perhaps makes sense instead to check if avahi is started at all (this can be done with 'avahi-daemon -c' and not notify if its not (i.e. its already disabled)

opinions?

Trent Lloyd (lathiat) wrote on 2007-02-20:

I've just realised I'm totally wrong the message that is actually appearing is from update-notifier, not /etc/network/if-up.d/avahi-daemon

unfortunately its midnight I must goto bed I will continue to investigate this issue tomorrow

Martin Pitt (pitti) wrote on 2007-02-27:

Indeed, I'll use Trent's patch to not show a notification if avahi is disabled. Additionally, I'll add a check whether avahi is currently running. No point in repeatedly trying to disable it and notify about it if it was already stopped.

Changed in avahi:
assignee:	nobody → pitti
status:	Unconfirmed → In Progress

Martin Pitt (pitti) on 2007-03-08

Changed in avahi:
status:	In Progress → Fix Committed

Martin Pitt (pitti) wrote on 2007-03-08:

avahi (0.6.17-0ubuntu2) feisty; urgency=low
.
   * debian/avahi-daemon.ifupdown: Do not check for an unicast .local domain if
     Avahi has been disabled in the default file or if the daemon is not
     running (LP: #83468), or when calling this script in mode 'stop'
     (LP: #84128).
   * debian/control: Set Ubuntu maintainer.