Multicast DNS in Linux

Last week I happily succeeded in finishing my OpenSuse 10.3 installation on my laptop. One of the things I had to solve was the problem that at my current customer where I work, I had problems with connecting to servers and intranet sites.

I had this same problem with Ubuntu 7.10, when I was working at another site of the same customer. I was then mentioned that it had to do with Multicast DNS that the customer's infrastructure did not support. In Ubuntu it was simply solved by disabling the system service that handled this service. I can't remember exactly where to find it (my memory is not created in the way that I photographically remember steps, but just the global procedures and how-to find's. That saves organic-memory-space I presume). But look for system services in the adminstration menu and then look for Multicast DNS and disable that.

In OpenSuse it was a little harder to find. But since I'm posting this blog you probably expect me having find it. And you're right.

1. Go to YaST2 (Green Chameleon/Computer/Administrator Settings)
2. Choose System/System Services (RunLevel)
3. Find Avahi-deamon and Avahi-dnsconfd and disable them (buttons below the screen)

In the description of the deamons you'll find a remark that these services handle mDNS and service registration. I figured that mDNS probably stands for multicast-dns. And indeed googling on mDNS brought me here: http://www.multicastdns.org/.