Bug#627357: gnome-desktop-environment: I would like to remove avahi-daemon because mdns slows down PTR lookup

[Karl O. Pinc]

On 10/01/2012 02:26:25 AM, Simon McVittie wrote:
> On Thu, 19 May 2011 at 16:11:07 -0500, Karl O. Pinc wrote:
> > gnome-desktop-environment depends on gnome-user-share which,
> > eventually, depends on avahi-daemon.  MDNS greatly slows down
> reverse
> > dns (PTR) lookups
> 
> You should be able to address this without changes to the metapackage
> by removing libnss-mdns, which is recommended by avahi-daemon, but
> leaving avahi-daemon installed and running. Result: Avahi continues
> to work if applications like gnome-user-share explicitly use it
> (via libavahi-* or direct use of its D-Bus API), but you can no 
> longer
> resolve through Avahi via the glibc name service switch API (so
> "ping foo.local" will no longer work).
> 
> Removing mdns from nsswitch.conf but leaving mdns4_minimal might also
> be worth considering for your situation: mdns4_minimal will only
> resolve hostnames that match *.local or 169.254.*.*, and only with
> IPv4.

Thanks for the response.

Perhaps a note in README.Debian is called for?


Karl <kop at meme.com>
Free Software:  "You don't pay back, you pay forward."
                 -- Robert A. Heinlein