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Making .local DNS address lookups work on Ubuntu Dapper

I’ve got avahi installed on Ubuntu Dapper, so I assumed that that would make looking up foo.local address lookups work. Lots of sites say “add mdns to the hosts line in /etc/nsswitch.conf“, but it wasn’t working. What is needed is an “mdns plugin” for nsswitch.conf, which is nss-mdns. Installing this (it’s the libnss-mdns package in Ubuntu) made it all work; I can now ping foo.local and it works! Yay!

(not sure why it isn’t there by default…)

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 9th, 2006 at 12:03 am and is filed under Howtos, Linux. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

10 Responses to “Making .local DNS address lookups work on Ubuntu Dapper”

  1. Thats all well and good if you know what the h*ck Avahi is - may I suggest at least a link ? :-)

    http://avahi.org/

    Bald
    8 hours later

  2. It’s not there by default due to the “no open ports” policy, which is also why avahi-daemon will be off by default. Apparently policy is more important than “works out of the box”.

    James
    41 hours later

  3. I understand why “no open ports” wins, and I think it’s a good policy. libnss-mdns doesn’t open a port, though, as I understand it. Even so, avahi should probably depend on it.

    sil
    41 hours later

  4. Ah, but it does open a port to listen for replies - so do dhcp and libnss-dns. https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2006-July/019680.html is a decent summary of the situation, but read the whole thread for more detail.

    James
    2 days later

  5. avahi-daemon recommends it, and I had it automatically installed by aptitude, I just love this little boy :)

    Michele
    3 days later

  6. This is completely ridiculous. I find your blog documenting your “aha!” moment but you don’t give clear instructions for how to reproduce this. I installed mss-ndns and added it to the host line of /etc/nsswitch.conf and local name resolution doesn’t work. Is this how you did it? Please give more details.

    Dave
    27 weeks later

  7. Dave: that’s exactly what I did; added “mdns” to nsswitch.conf and installed nss-mdns. It then worked for me. Sorry if that’s not the case any more…

    sil
    27 weeks later

  8. Hi there!
    How can I set up (maybe under nsswitch.conf) user permissions for Mac computers to access my Linux distro?

    Thanks!

    Diogo
    62 weeks later

  9. I just wanted to comment that the content located here was not worth the 10 minutes it takes a dialup user to load your flash banner. Is that really necessary?

    I guess I shouldn’t complain, I just wanted to be heard.

    Thanks

    Chance
    107 weeks later

  10. Chance: which Flash banner? There’s no Flash here.

    sil
    107 weeks later

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