[Freedombox-discuss] Avahi

[Tim Retout]

On 20 Mar 2014 10:36, "Petter Reinholdtsen" <pere at hungry.com> wrote:
>
> [Petter Reinholdtsen]
> > I agree that avahi/mdns would be very useful, and will change
> > freedombox-setup to pull in avahi-daemon, avahi-utils and libnss-mdns
> > on the freedombox.
>
> This is now in place, and freshly built images (or upgraded images)
> will get avahi-daemon installed by default.
>
> > With this in place, visiting <URL: http://freedombox.local/ > gave me
> > the jwchat web interface. :)
>
> And this work for a while, when using a virtual machine on my wheezy
> laptop.  But just a few minutes after the freedombox was booted (or
> avahi-daemon restarted), the freedombox.local mDNS name is no longer
> known.  Anyone know what is going on here?

Hm, your client machine needs libnss-mdns, and avahi-daemon needs to be
running on the freedombox... if the daemon stops responding, the address
will no longer work. It would be worth checking the logs, perhaps?

> > Is Bonjour in Debian?  Is it the same as zeroconf?
>
> Still wonder about this one. :)

"Bonjour" is the brand name of the Apple library that implements the two
standards mDNS and DNS-SD, which together are two-thirds of "Zeroconf"
networking. Bonjour is shipped out of the box on OS X (and I believe iOS),
and is bundled with iTunes on Windows. The equivalent client library in
Debian is libnss-mdns, which is a dependency of the main desktop
environments (I think).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_configuration_networking

So I was raising the point that not all Windows desktops will be able to
find .local addresses without installing Bonjour, which might be important.
On mobiles, iPhones should work, but I have not found a solution for
Android (unless you build your own app).

This sucks, but it is still the most user-friendly way I have yet found for
getting people onto the web interface when you don't know the IP address of
the box. I want to look more into the Microsoft upnp protocols to see if
there's something that works for Windows. And I think Android support is
quite important given the way things are going. But Mac and Linux users are
sorted. :)

Hope that helps,

Tim
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