avahi-daemon, it's on, is it needed?

[Matthew J. Roth]

Tim Alberts wrote:
> I see in FC6 that this avahi-daemen seems to always get installed and 
> always wants to be run from the bootup scripts.
>
> It appears to be a network service discovery program.  Does Fedora 6 
> use it, does fedora 6 need it, and if so, what services does it 
> discover and what configuration does it need (if any)?
Tim,

 From '/etc/rc.d/init.d/avahi-daemon':

# description: This is a daemon which runs on client machines to perform \
#              Zeroconf service discovery on a network. avahi-daemon 
must be \
#              running on systems  that use Avahi for service discovery. \
#              Avahi-daemon should not be running otherwise.

I don't use Zeroconf <http://www.zeroconf.org/>, so as part of my 
post-install routine I turn this service off and remove the Zeroconf 
route by adding the following line to '/etc/sysconfig/network':

NOZEROCONF=yes

So far this has never caused any problems on the dozen or so machines 
I've done it to.

Matthew Roth
InterMedia Marketing Solutions
Software Engineer and Systems Developer