register host without reverse entry in /etc/avahi/hosts

[cweiske]

I'm trying to permanently register a subdomain project.machine.local for my computer in /etc/avahi/hosts. Doing that and restarting avahi-daemon gives me an error in syslog:

avahi-daemon[24327]: Static host name project.machine.local: avahi_server_add_address failure: Local name collision

I can register the name with avahi-publish when giving the --no-reverse option:

$ avahi-publish -a -R project.machine.local 192.168.178.13
Established under name 'project.machine.local'

It would be nice if there was a way to specify this option in the hosts file, too.

[lathiat]

Thanks for the request. This has been a commonly desired feature over the years and the reverse DNS issue has caused problems to most approaches as you suggest.

I will look at how to best address this in the next release, either through an alias configuration file option or some other API.

I feel like a most ideal way to do this would be through a special-case service (and thus service file) that created a local hostname alias... to also give programs a way to create such alias hostnames via the API.

its a bit of an abuse of mDNS and almost side-steps DNS -SD but it seems like a commonly desired feature

[danni]

This would be a useful feature when publishing a docker-machine via Avahi back to your host machine.

[fauno]

i was just here to ask for this :)

the alternative is using this: https://gist.github.com/gdamjan/3168336

but i wouldn't want to keep track of another service

[jernst]

Would love to have this, too, so UBOS could easily publish multiple virtual hostnames as users deploy sites. Creating a separate avahi-publish daemon for each entry is not so great.

[lathiat]

Duplicate #109 made note that it would be nice not to have to specify the IP (but perhaps have the option). Should be included in the feature.

#40 (comment) specifically to specify a local interface name to get the ip from