[Pkg-utopia-maintainers] Bug#433945: avahi-daemon: .local in unicast detection not perfect

[Tony Hoyle]

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Package: avahi-daemon
Version: 0.6.19-2
Severity: normal

I've been thinking about this.. specifically why OSX has no problems
with DNS domains ending in .local and avahi does (and also that .local
in unicast detection can never work because that's not the root of the
problem IMO).

A company I work with has a domain ending in .local, historical, because
when they started they were a purely OSX shop and that's what their
limited knowledge said was good.  It's since sprouted a few active
directory servers, exchange email, etc.  Changing just isn't going to
happen.

In this environment from this OSX box I can ping any box in the domain -
OSX works perfectly.  avahi breaks in various ways, causing all sorts of
wierd effects.

What OSX is doing is distinguishing betweeen foo.bar.local and foo.local
- - the former is purely a DNS domain, and the latter is an mdns query.
This is shown where bar.local has an A record but OSX cannot in fact
resolve it.. it goes to mdns and aborts.  foo.bar.local responds
immediately.

avahi doesn't appear to do this.. it sees the .local, gets somewhat
confused and barfs (even if I rename a machine to foo.bar.local
experimentally and run avahi on it it can't resolve it, so it's not
working at all).

As to why the .local detection can't work - because on domains that
avahi has a problem with .local probably doesn't exist.. bar.local
might, but on a local DNS server it would be unusual to define the root
TLD like that.  I don't *think* anyone is actually using the .local
domain itself (never seen it, myself).

Also the solution proposed in message #5 wouldn't work in the case I'm
seeing - these are domains coming in over VPN not defined in
resolv.conf.. there's probably no way of detecting it automatically.

I propose that avahi be changed to match the OSX behaviour.  It's not
perfect, but it'd break a *lot* less systems.

Tony
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