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Nickolai Leschov
Asked: 2013-09-01 06:27:57 +0800 CST

Network service discovery disabled: What does this mean for me?

  • 772

Every time at boot I get a message “Network service discovery disabled. Your current network has a .local domain, which is not recommended and incompatible with the Avahi network service discovery. The service has been disabled.”

Network service discovery disabled

What does this mean for me?

Wi-Fi is disabled.

wireless

4 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    It looks like avahi-daemon is started when the network connection is established (/etc/network/if-up.d/avahi-daemon). This notification is informing you that mDNS (Avahi) has been disabled. It's only used for a small number of applications that only work on the local network, it won't adversely affect your internet connection or DNS.

    The most well known use for mDNS is sharing music with Rhythmbox (or iTunes) over your LAN. It's an Apple technology, but it's largely been ignored in favour of uPNP or DLNA.

    To disable it, you must edit the file /etc/default/avahi-daemon as root:

    sudo -i
gedit /etc/default/avahi-daemon

    and add this line (or change it if already exists to):

    AVAHI_DAEMON_DETECT_LOCAL=0

    Source: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1632952

    • 117

  2. According to the Avahi wiki there are two workarounds:

    Better one:

    In /etc/avahi/avahi-daemon.conf uncomment and change the line with domain name to 

    domain-name=.alocal

    Second one:

    In /etc/nsswitch.conf delete a [NOTFOUND=return] text.

    • 16

  3. It probably says that Avahi is disabled because you have a .local domain and Avahi doesn't work very well with this.

    Avahi is a zero conf protocol like Apples Bonjour commonly used if you have Macs on your network or if you want to chat with others on your local network without logging in to a server like Google Talk or MSN Messenger.

    You can read about the problem here.

    You could probably just ignore it or configure your network to use another domain name then the default .local.

    • 3

  4. While there may be multiple causes, I began getting the exact same error on ubuntu 14.04 after a change of ISP. Some naughty ISP's use local domain addresses for their DNS servers as explained here. My ubuntu box's network uses a manual configuration so setting the DNS to my router's IP instead of the ISP's DNS server address fixed the problem. Internally, the router is using the ISP's locally domained DNS server but ubuntu is unaware and happy. More evidence here that this is the ISP's fault

    In short, check if your ISP is using local domain non-routable DNS IP addresses. If so, switch DNS provider on ubuntu.

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