The DNS Problem

If you own an Apple Airport device or Timecapsule you may have come across the issue of it (unlike similar products from DLink and other specialists) not having an inbuilt DNS service hooked up to the DHCP requests (i.e. being able to resolve local computer names to lan ips the same way you might resolve a website to an ip address, by DNS).

This annoyed me greatly yesterday. Today Ray reminded me of Bonjour, Zeroconf, whatever you want to call it. This tech reminds me of the old windows networking protocol. It may be completely different, but it's amusing to see an abhorred concept coming back again.

Problems have solutions you know

Things worked one way out of the box (8.10), I was able to use ssh hostname.local from Ubuntu to my Mac right off. This is nice as with a default and a public key exchange this is a seamless remote login process.

The other way was not working, but not far out of reach. On my install avahi-demon was already present with the zeroconf plugin, both configured and running, it just didn't have anything to shout about.

This forum thread is recent and works, which is more than can be said for the Ubuntu documentation page for this particular subject.

A template ssh broadcast file is provided with the avahi install. Template so far as you can just copy-paste it into position and ssh will start being broadcast on the network.

sudo cp /usr/share/doc/avahi-daemon/examples/ssh.service /etc/avahi/services

sudo /etc/init.d/avahi-daemon restart

Service Browsing Apps

iStumbler comes with a Bonjour plugin, so you can use it to monitor what's available on your network visually.

For Gnome there is an application "Service Discovery Applet" available via Synaptic (which you can then add by right clicking the menu bar/panel, add, browse down to zeroconf discovery).