[Bug 172869] Review Request: nss-mdns

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Summary: Review Request: nss-mdns


https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=172869





------- Additional Comments From lennart at poettering.de  2007-05-24 08:13 EST -------
To say the least, Ulrich Drepper is not exactly a fan of seeing this integrated
into the default Fedora install. In a recent chat on IRC that I had with him he
raised a few issues he has with nss-mdns which I cannot really "fix".  (As a
side note: I am upstream of nss-mdns)

Firstly, he believes that mDNS might be a waste of power and traffic and wants
to see a big field test in Westford. I believe this is a big waste of time and
resources, and is nothing I can organize from Hamburg/Germany. Also it is
somewhat redundant, because Apple reports some scalability numbers for mDNS
which have been generated by such a field test. (please also note that nss-mdns
by itself doesn't impose any traffic on the net. Avahi does that and unless you
actually look some kind of .local domain lookup nss-mdns will not add to that in
any way)

Secondly, Fedora uses nscd by default. Running nscd and nss-mdns together
doesn't make too much sense if you use the "reload" option in nscd.conf. However
that option is used by default and Ulrich appears not to be interested in
finding a way to disable this option for mDNS lookups.

Then, he thinks that mDNS is braindead because the cacheing protocol works
differently from classic DNS. Leaves me speachless ...

He apparently also thinks that Avahi is not a good thing either, but is OK with
it in the default install as long as he may shut it down easily. The argument
that nss-mdns is disabled at the same time as avahi is shut down he doesn't
really accept, citing that the tiny bit of CPU time that is wasted when the
nss-mdns module checks whether avahi is around is too much. (which btw is rather
contradictorily, since nscd optimizes that away anyway)

This is all very unfortunate. I am not sure what we can do about this. But as a
total newcomer to Red Hat and Fedora I don't feel I am in a position to to fight
this through -- at least for now. Maybe when I have a better insight into how
Fedora and everything works I will give it another try.

What we can do of course is getting nss-mdns into Fedora, but only as an
optional package. To get this working cleanly the package would have to patch
nsswitch.conf and nscd.conf on installing -- which is rather ugly. It's better
than nothing, but not exactly the fullfillment of the promise of "zero
configuration".

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