Fwd: Re: Server issues

[Neal McBurnett]

On Wed, Nov 21, 2007 at 12:37:25AM -0700, Neal McBurnett wrote:
> And that avahi does have .local problems, at least some of which are
> documented by Avahi here:
> 
>  http://avahi.org/wiki/AvahiAndUnicastDotLocal
> 
>  If Avahi and nss-mdns is installed properly a machine does not
>  contact a unicast DNS server when resolving names from the .local
>  domain, thus the unicast DNS domain .local becomes unreachable.

There is a forum thread that started with a query about why Avahi was
refusing to run on startup:

 * Starting Avahi mDNS/DNS-SD Daemon: avahi-daemon
 * avahi-daemon disabled because there is a unicast .local domain

and we haven't talked much about that aspect of it here.  I guess this
is an outgrowth of the Mountain View discussion about avahi and

 http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=393711

I guess that doesn't cover ivoks' vpn use case though, which is
relatively thorny I'd think.

> Also I've seen, as reported here, that Microsoft is giving bogus
> advice on using .local.  And of course all of that is a problem for
> avahi and for Microsoft customers....

The problem seems more widespread.  There is a report on that same
forum thread from an ubuntu user who has a D-Link dl-624+ router,
which apparently defines a ".local" domain by default, and lets folks
change that name if they like.  By post #11 the thread gets to the
root cause (the D-Link) for one user:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=3814101

Neal McBurnett                 http://mcburnett.org/neal/