nss-mdns 0.8 review

nss-mdns is a plugin for the GNU Name Service Switch (NSS) functionality of the GNU C Library (glibc) providing host name resolution

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 334K Developer: Lennart Poettering

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nss-mdns is a plugin for the GNU Name Service Switch (NSS) functionality of the GNU C Library (glibc) providing host name resolution via Multicast DNS (aka Zeroconf, aka Apple Rendezvous, aka Apple Bonjour), effectively allowing name resolution by common Unix/Linux programs in the ad-hoc mDNS domain .local.

nss-mdns project provides client functionality only, which means that you have to run a mDNS responder daemon seperately from nss-mdns if you want to register the local host name via mDNS. I recommend Avahi.

nss-mdns is very lightweight (24 KByte stripped binary .so compiled with -DNDEBUG=1 -Os on i386, gcc 4.0), has no dependencies besides the glibc and requires only minimal configuration.

Optionally nss-mdns can try to contact a running avahi-daemon to make use of its superior record cacheing.

Requirements:
Currently, nss-mdns is tested on Linux only. A fairly modern glibc installation with development headers (2.0 or newer) is required. Not suprisingly nss-mdns requires a kernel compiled with IPv4 multicasting support enabled.
nss-mdns was developed and tested on Debian GNU/Linux "testing" from December 2004, it should work on most other Linux distributions (and maybe Unix versions) since it uses GNU autoconf and GNU libtool for source code configuration and shared library management.

Installation:

As this package is made with the GNU autotools you should run ./configure inside the distribution directory for configuring the source tree. After that you should run make for compilation and make install (as root) for installation of nss-mdns.

What's New in This Release:
A build time option was added to disable "legacy unicast" mDNS requests, meaning that requests will resolve exclusively with Avahi.
A special "minimal" flavor of the shared objects was built to minimize unnecessary name lookup timeouts.
IPv6 resolving when using Avahi was fixed.