Do I need any part of Avahi at all?

[Robert Heller]

At Mon, 28 Sep 2020 08:40:20 -0400 "Ubuntu user technical support,  not for general discussions" <ubuntu-users at lists.ubuntu.com> wrote:

> 
> one person's anecdote:
> 
> I've been running that way for years... removing avahi whenever it showed
> up. It's a different (supposedly easier/self/autoconfiguring) way of doing
> the same thing, but if you're handy with dns and dhcp, then there is very
> little value in avahi.

Avahi is an "Apple" thing that is meant to auto-discover things on your
network and auto-configure them. This *might* be a good idea for people who
are totally clueless and are randomly plugin in printers, scanners, computers,
and such into their home network. I guess it *sometimes* works ok. It can be a
royal pain in the arse if you have a well organized LAN (eg you have a DHCP
server configured to give "static" IP addresses to your networked devices) and
a DNS server (eg Bind9) that provides host names for all of your network
devices. Avahi will *probable* provide confusing (not always correct)
configurations. That is, if you have a networked printer that you have
carefully configured on your LAN, Avahi will procede to auto-configure it
*again*, not necessarily the wayv*you* want it configured, likely as not
creating an additional printer queue, so you might suddenly have two print
queues on your wife's laptop: HomeOfficePrinter (that you configured) and
LP12847585 (showing up "randomly" and confusing your wife). This sort of
nonsense kept happening at the local library where I manage a network of
Ubuntu workstations, until I did an apt-get purge \*avahi\*...

> 
> a lot of people group Avahi with ipv6, I don't really get why... I just ran
> bind and dhcp supporting dual stack for about five years, until my ISP
> ended their beta program and backed out of IPv6 entirely. It was fine the
> whole time.
> 
> 
> On Mon, Sep 28, 2020 at 7:36 AM Chris Green <cl at isbd.net> wrote:
> 
> > I run several [x]ubuntu systems on a small home LAN.  There is a
> > separate Raspberry Pi system running dnsmasq to provide local DNS and
> > DHCP.
> >
> > Therefore I don't think I need any part of Avahi, am I right?  Can I
> > simply uninstall it all?  There's avahi-autoipd, avahi-daemon and
> > avahi-utils plus some libraries.
> >
> > --
> > Chris Green
> >
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> > ubuntu-users at lists.ubuntu.com
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> 

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