On Mon, 2022-01-31 at 16:59 +0800, Ed Greshko wrote: > I don't know much about Avahi/Bonjour/mDNS/ZeroConf I think it is/was > a way to shoehorn Linux into some Windows environments. I hardly had > to deal with that. > > I also didn't deal much with SMB as only ever had a couple of Windows > systems. Now None. And the companies I worked for had staff that > dealt with that. Not to toot my horn, I did have to come to their > rescue from time to time. It didn't make it any easier with their > horrible understanding of networking. I think we can blame Windows knowledge (hurrumph) with a lot of the internet's woes. :-p In the past, and probably still now: Avahi, et al, use a decentralised (lack of) method to let all the clients try and sort things out by themselves, and discover things on the network (like your printer, NAS, etc), it's not just addressing but device and feature discovery. It's a form of self-advertising *and* network probing by each client, and it did this over a different set of ports like DNS and DHCP, it used the ".local" domain, and, it wanted to be in control of it. i.e. Trying to make use of .local outside of Avahi's self-management can lead to nasty surprises. Take this one bit of advice into long term memory, don't use it with your DHCP server, or manual address naming, ESPECIALLY if Avahi, et al, are on your network. If everything works, then fine. But if something stuffs it up, you don't have *one* thing to try and configure into submission. You have to go around trying to beat all the clients into submission. With traditional DHCP and DNS serving, you have one server that everything else is controlled by. You configure the server to do what you want. You configure clients (if you have to) to obey the server, but generally the clients default was to obey a server, and you had to manually intervene to do it some other way. Linux had an interesting quirk of using ".localdomain" as its LAN domain (at least on the few distros I've played with). Microsoft may have used .mshome or .home (as my router uses, actually it also uses .router, not that it tells you about any of this). And plenty of people have used .lan as their domain. But there's no well-defined LAN domain name to use in lieu of registering a real domain name. With a mixed system, you're in for a world of pain, because Avahi, DHCP and DNS don't talk to each other. Individually configuring devices in a business was a complete pain, but used to be not too hard in a home environment. But, now, home environments are possibly more complex than business ones. Modem/router, one or more desktop computers, one or more laptops, several phones and tablets, smart TVs and media players, (allegedly) smart lighting lightbulbs in every room, smart central heating and air conditioning, smart solar and vehicle charging. And at some stage people are going to stop making devices look for DHCP and fallback on Avahi, they'll decide to simplify things and just follow the latest fad. You'll end up with a gadget that only does Avahi. In my opinion, Avahi should only be used on a network where nothing else will be doing address management. And my current devices work that way. Quite apart from me turning it off where I can, so far everything will configure themselves using DHCP first, and either ignore Avahi, or use it in addition (e.g. your printer may be discovered, as a printing device, using it). If you want to do use names, rather than just numerical IP addressing, on your LAN. Thought needs to go into your hostnames and domain names, and keeping an eye on trends that appear outside of your LAN. e.g. It could be that .lan starts getting a defined use that'll clash with yours, and simply calling your PC "fedora" will annoy you if you have more than one PC with fedora installations. There's some value in registering a real domain name, even if you don't host websites, etc. It's yours to use as you like, you control it. And there are still a few cheap registrars around. A few bucks a year for less networking pain can be well worth it. -- uname -rsvp Linux 3.10.0-1160.53.1.el7.x86_64 #1 SMP Fri Jan 14 13:59:45 UTC 2022 x86_64 Boilerplate: All unexpected mail to my mailbox is automatically deleted. I will only get to see the messages that are posted to the mailing list. _______________________________________________ users mailing list -- users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to users-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Do not reply to spam on the list, report it: https://pagure.io/fedora-infrastructure
