avahi-aliases

The Avahi System facilitates service discovery on local networks using the Multicast DNS/DNS-SD protocol suite.

The current implementation of Avahi (v0.8) does not yet support aliases (i.e., CNAME records). Avahi-alias, in its many variations, fills this gap.

This variation of avahi-alias provides:

• Python 3 compatibility,
• Avahi v0.8 compatibility,
• Systemd compatibility, and
• Full install and remove capability.

Prerequisites

For proper installation and execution of this variation of avahi-alias, the following are required:

• Python 3. Python 3 is now the defacto version distributed with nearly all Linux distributions.

• Avahi v0.8. Avahi v0.8, released Feb 18, 2020, includes Python 3 bindings. Its availability varies across Linux distributions. In particular, many long-term support releases (e.g., Ubuntu 20.04 LTS) still include Avahi v0.7. (Although in the case of Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, it appears the Avahi v0.8 packages available for Debian Bulleye can replace the v0.7 packages transparently. This has not been well tested!)

• Systemd. The install and uninstall make targets work with Systemd. A rudimentary init system script is also include.

Installing and Removing

From the avahi-alias directory, run make install. This will install the scripts to /usr/local/bin, setup systemd services, and start the service. Installation and removal options include:

• make install performs full installation (and reinstallation).
• make install-binaries creates the /etc/avahi/aliases files and installes the scripts to /usr/local/bin.
• make install-unit installs and starts the systemd service.
• make remove performs a full removal.
• make remove-binaries removes the scripts from /usr/local/bin.
• make remove-unit stops and removes the systemd service.

Note: The install and remove make targets assume the current user has sudo rights and executes most steps using sudo.

Adding and removing aliases

Aliases are stored in /etc/avahi/aliases. Add and remove aliases by editing /etc/avahi/aliases directly. Althernatively, use the avahi-add-alias and avahi-remove-alias scripts. Examples:

• sudo avahi-add-alias alias1.local adds alias1.local to /etc/avahi/aliases.
• sudo avahi-remove-alias alias1.local removes alias1.local from /etc/avahi/aliases.

Acknowledgements

• Original Python 2 sources (This is now offline. Archive.org has an archived copy.)
• Discussion on Stack Overflow.
• Original repo on GitHub.
• Original systemd repo on GitHub.
• Service implementation gist.