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zephod

Member

Registered: 2024-12-27

Posts: 7  

mDNS failure

I have an HP wireless printer on my network and its hostname is HP<12 digit hex string>. mDNS is running and I can ping the printer with
$ ping HP<hex string>.local

I changed the hostname on the printer to be just "Printer" but I still have to use the old hostname to ping.
I did some research and found that I should be able to see the mDNS names with avahi-browse. The first time I used this command I got a list of service names but since then all I get is an error:
$ avahi-browse --all
avahi_service_browser_new() failed: Invalid service type

Some more research led me to this thread: https://github.com/avahi/avahi/issues/212 which shows that there is a long standing  bug in avahi wherein it stops after encountering a device that sends a malformed service announcement.

So I have a couple of questions:
Am I correct in thinking that we have to wait for upstream to fix this?
Does anyone know of a way to determine what is sending the malformed service announcement?
Is there a way to update the mDNS cache manually or some other workaround so that I can use ping Printer.local?

Steve.

chris2be8

Member

Registered: 2018-08-11

Posts: 317  

Re: mDNS failure

Can you make avahi work again by restarting it (if all else fails by rebooting the system)? If so you could try switching off each device in turn until you find the one that causes avahi to fail (hoping there's only one such device). It might take a while though.

zephod

Member

Registered: 2024-12-27

Posts: 7  

Re: mDNS failure

I have installed mdns-scan and I can see that something is publishing what looks like a spinner, ie,
Bad host name-           
Bad host name
Bad host name\           
Bad host name
Bad host name|           
Bad host name
Bad host name\           
Bad host name
etc forever

I think I will have to do as you say and turn everything of one by one.