Do I need avahi?

[Timothy Murphy]

I recently noticed that I have been getting warnings
  avahi-daemon[5884]: dbus-protocol.c: 
    Too many objects for client ':1.15', client request failed.
on my server.
I must admit I didn't know I was running avahi on the server.

I looked at a couple of avahi howtos,
and it seemed that for almost any usage other packages are required,
in particular nss-mdns .
If this is in fact required by avahi, it seems surprising
that it is not automatically installed at the same time.
(None of the examples of avahi usage actually worked on my system.)

But my real query is whether avahi (or zeroconf)
could actually offer me anything useful.
I'm running dhcpd on the server,
and I'm not looking for information about printers
or other users on my home network.

Also, is there any way of discovering who "client 1.15" is?
And is anything likely to go wrong if I simply "service avahi-daemon stop"?

-- 
Timothy Murphy  
e-mail: gayleard /at/ eircom.net
tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366
School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland