Tuesday, May 13, 2014

Ubuntu, Avahi, and .local Domains

So, today I completed set-up on a test domain for our network. 

Because I'm suuuper nice, I figured I should make some DNS entries in our production server for this new test domain.  That way the users of this domain wouldn't need to remember the IPs in play.

This was my first experience trying to remote a machine on a .local domain from my ubuntu box.  It did not go well - I could not get the names to resolve to IPs even though they all work fine for windows clients.  Turns out that .local does not play nice with Ubuntu.

Avahi is a zero config networking implementation, similar to apple's Bonjour.  So long story short, it is useless to me.  It turns out the the .local TLD gets used by Avahi, and here in lies my trouble.

FIX:

Edit the : /etc/nsswitch.conf file:

Comment out the line:

     hosts: file mdns4_minimal [NOTFOUND=return] dns mdns4

 
And add this in its place:

     hosts: files dns



doesn't even need a reboot to start immediately resolving .local names from your DNS server.

Note:  in case this is not clear, this will break Avahi

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