Installation of tmdns

tmdns is an alternative multicast DNS daemon (alternative to mDNSResponder). It's slight advantage is, is that is a bit more configurable, and that it can be used in conjunction with a regular name server, by only modifying /etc/resolv.conf (and not installing libnss_mdns, like mDNSResponder requires).

Download: http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/zeroconf/∞

tmdns is not really nicely configured. The startup script only works is tmdns is installed in /usr, not if it is installed in /usr/local. So this is how I configured it:

Installed files

/usr/sbin/update-resolvrdv
/usr/sbin/register-service
/usr/sbin/tmdns
/usr/man/man5/tmdns.conf.5
/usr/man/man5/tmdns.services.5
/usr/man/man8/tmdns.8
/etc/rc.d/init.d/tmdns

Manual changes:

• Optionally create config file using tmdns -P > /etc/tmdns.conf
• Add /etc/rc*.d/*tmdns files (remove the /etc/rc*.d/*mdns files)
• Change /etc/resolv.conf to include nameserver 127.0.0.1 and optional searchdomain local.

Possible bug

It seems that tmdns has a bug so that local requests (by gethostbyname() and gethostbyaddr() in the UNIX sockets library) are not correctly forwarded to other servers. Requests from other hosts are handled correctly. However, debugging is a night-mare since the results of gethostby*() seem extremely cached. It seems that there is a bug in tmdns, since it gives this error: "ns_initparse: Message too long" when it receives a message from a mdns daemon.

Categories

CategoryZeroconf