Something Ate My Avahi

So the new NAS is happily running Debian now, and I'll write a long blog for anyone who wants to do the same once I have one remaining problem sorted out... Avahi doesn't work. If I start Avahi on the NAS other machines see the announcement and the names it provides will resolve, but after a few minutes they fail to resolve as they timeout. Unless my router is incredibly brain-dead it can't be the cause, because the old NAS is connected in exactly the same way and it works fine. For extra fun, the NAS can't see the rest of the mDNS network. It's almost like the network driver is dropping incoming multicast packets.

Before anyone asks, there is no firewall running on the NAS. Does anyone have any ideas?

NP: Remembranza, Murcof

10:00 Monday, 08 Oct 2007 [#] [computers] (8 comments)

Posted by daniels at Mon Oct 8 11:01:38 2007:
Maybe the network driver is dropping incoming multicast packets.
Posted by Ross at Mon Oct 8 11:17:25 2007:
Wow its like you are reading my mind.  Or having a conversation with me.  It must be one of those options.
Posted by iain at Mon Oct 8 14:28:19 2007:
It was probably Henry...dogs eat everything
Posted by Markus at Mon Oct 8 15:55:29 2007:
Wow, that's interesting. I have exactly the same problem, but didn't have the time & energy to look into it and browse/file bug reports. on my old nslu2 running etch, avahi works but on my "new" thecus n2100 (etch as well) avahi doesn't work (i still have them both running side by side, same avahi setup with different results). i first noticed when my itunes shares (using mt-daapd & itunes) kept disappearing after accessing them the first time. even using the packages from mt-daapd.org (which are not depending on avahi, i guess they have howl built-in?) didn't solve it, so i guess it might some weird problem related to the nic driver / arm platform combination or whatever.

markus
Posted by Ross at Mon Oct 8 16:17:33 2007:
I'm 99% sure its the ethernet driver, r8169.  From most reports its not the best driver, so it appears that this is just another bug.

In the meantime I finally built the wifi kernel driver, and now Avahi works.
Posted by avahirocks at Tue Oct 9 01:23:53 2007:
Looks like a borked network driver. Try setting ALLMULTI or PROMISC on the interface with ifconfig or iproute.

lennart
Posted by avahirocks at Tue Oct 9 16:22:49 2007:
I added this now as question #15 to the Avahi FAQ:

http://avahi.org/wiki/Avah4users#FAQ
Posted by Ross at Tue Oct 9 16:35:56 2007:
Lennart, agreed it looks like the network driver is broken.  I ended up finally building the wifi driver, and now avahi works fine.

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