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dty
Asked: 2014-12-13 03:46:58 +0800 CST

How to prevent Avahi adding -2 to hostnames

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Often (maybe 80% of the time), when I reboot a machine running Avahi, it starts using machinename-2.local as it's hostname. All the machines on my network have unique hostnames, so there is no collision.

How do I prevent Avahi from appending -2 to hostnames?

(This turns out to be an incredibly difficult thing to Google for...)

linux

3 Answers

  1. This is also the case with OS X machines.

    If the hostname is already in use on the network it bumps the counter to make the names unique again. I would suspect that the machine in question may have two netcards to the same network (cabled and wireless) or that you have a bonjour proxy running (which may be unknown to you) which helps sleeping machines by holding their hostname active. To be more certain you may want to describe your network better.

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  2. In my case, this behavior is caused by a Plex Media Server inside a docker container which runs its own avahi-daemon. I'm using this docker image: https://hub.docker.com/r/linuxserver/plex/

    The number was increased very often, without need to restart.

    After stopping the docker container and a restart of avahi-daemon.service, the numbers disappeared.

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  3. I have the same problem on a Raspberry Pi. Until a better solution comes along, Ive added a crontab entry to run this script every day.

    #!/bin/bash

writelog()
{
echo $(date) >> /home/pi/avahirestart.log
}
aname=$(avahi-resolve -a $(hostname -I|cut -d' ' -f1)|cut -f2)
if [[ "$aname" = *"-2"* ]];then
sudo service avahi-daemon restart
writelog
fi
if [[ "$aname" = *"-3"* ]];then
sudo service avahi-daemon restart
writelog
fi
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