I think that there are separate problems here that are getting intermingled in this bug report and others (e.g. https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/avahi/+bug/94940 )
The particular variant that the original bug reporter appears to be suffering from (and I happen to also be suffering from) is that even if you have a DNS server that authoritatively claims that no reverse mapping is available for a particular IP address mdns4 still times out trying to find a name via Multicast DNS. It does this even if the IP address is not even on the local network (I can imagine a situation where this might actually be useful but I doubt it occurs in practice.) I was able to stop reverse lookups gettings as far as mdns4 in this situation by changing /etc/nsswitch.conf to say: hosts: files mdns4_minimal [NOTFOUND=return] dns [NOTFOUND=return] mdns4 The idea is that if a definitive failure is returned by DNS then it won't go on to try Multicast DNS. If DNS times out or is unconfigured then Multicast DNS is tried (and may then go on to time out.) This works for me (on lenny) in avoiding the timeout when the DNS server responds with NXDOMAIN. In theory it should also support the AutoIP ad-hoc network with no DNS server situation too but I can't easily test that. It does break when there is a DNS server that doesn't know about every host on the network but only for reverse mapping so it may not be the end of the world. I agree with Martin in message #29 and Trent in message #34 that the only decent way to solve this is to rely on avahi to cache mDNS information as hosts come and go and rely on that cache only for reverse lookups. The answer will then always be (almost) instant. Mike. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected]
