Hi Mark!

Thank you for pointing me to this bug. I spent some time looking into
this.

It seems that there is currently no established mechanism for ordering
NSS modules into nsswitch.conf automatically. Instead every package is
doing its own parsing mangling of the file on install. libnss-resolve is
appending "[!UNAVAIL=return]" which causes the mdns4_minimal entry to
get shadowed, depending on installation order of the packages involved
(libnss-mdns and libnss-resolve).

A workaround was implemented in Debian in
https://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/collab-maint/nss-
mdns.git/commit/?id=44550bcc6b49116f927dea52395867ff47d7d3b9 (tests in
https://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/collab-maint/nss-
mdns.git/commit/?id=0e9b82b91cd9bf9464cf63df2c3f1cbbec3553e0) which
appears in Zesty (17.04) which will explain why Zesty appears to work
correctly. Though this is still a hack, I think it should work in both
ordering cases, so in the short term this should be fixed from a user's
perspective.

In the long term, Debian have a bug open (https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-
bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=846944) to fix the hack. It may be that mDNS
resolution moves to libnss-resolve, or that some kind of configuration
wrapper is arranged to improve on the ad-hoc mangling of nsswitch.conf.

So, for Ubuntu:

This is fixed in Zesty onwards.

The workaround for Yakkety (as you explained) is to edit
/etc/nsswitch.conf and bring "mdns4_minimal [NOTFOUND=return]" in front
of "resolve [!UNAVAIL=return]".

We could propose an update for Yakkety (16.10). But we have to do it
carefully - if there is a bug in the update, we could break DNS
resolution for all users. However, Debian have already written the
essential "swap it round" code so that will already have had some real
world testing.  But Yakkety has only two months left before it EOLs, and
the workaround for affected users is fairly trivial. So is it worth
trying? Opinions welcome.

For bug triage, there are effectively two bugs. 1) The fact that it
doesn't work for users in Yakkety; and 2) the bigger picture fix for the
hack or move of mDNS resolution to libnss-resolve. I see this bug as
having been reported for the first issue, and the Debian bug as tracking
the second. So I'll mark the systemd task as Invalid, as the fix for
this bug was in libnss-mdns (and we can track any SRU for libnss-mdns
here). I'm not linking the Debian bug, as that's the separate second
issue. If we want to track that in Launchpad, we should file a separate
bug for it, so as not to mix up the separate statuses of the two issues.

** Bug watch added: Debian Bug tracker #846944
   http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=846944

** Changed in: systemd (Ubuntu)
       Status: Confirmed => Invalid

** Also affects: nss-mdns (Ubuntu Yakkety)
   Importance: Undecided
       Status: New

** Also affects: systemd (Ubuntu Yakkety)
   Importance: Undecided
       Status: New

** Changed in: systemd (Ubuntu Yakkety)
       Status: New => Invalid

** Changed in: nss-mdns (Ubuntu)
       Status: Confirmed => Fix Released

** Changed in: nss-mdns (Ubuntu Yakkety)
       Status: New => Triaged

** Changed in: nss-mdns (Ubuntu Yakkety)
   Importance: Undecided => Medium

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1641328

Title:
  Ordering of mdns4_minimal and resolve in /etc/nsswitch.conf causes
  mDNS lookups to fail -- breaks network printing

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