Avahi in Launchpad

Avahi

Registered 2005-09-29 by Avahi

Avahi is a fully LGPL framework for Multicast DNS Service Discovery.
It allows programs to publish and discover services and hosts running on a local network with no specific configuration.
For example you can plug into a network and instantly find printers to print to, files to look at and people to talk to.

Avahi is designed to be compatible with the mDNS/DNS-SD specification and boasts the following features

* Fully open source and freely available under the LGPL
* Full IPv4 and IPv6 support
* An embeddable mDNS stack
* Dynamic adjustment to network reconfiguration
* Daemon with DBUS API for desktop applications
* C library to interface with the DBUS API
* C# library
* Compatible with other mDNS/DNS-SD implementations such as Howl and Apple Bonjour (previously Rendezvous)
* Ability to correctly "reflect" mDNS between two or more LAN segments
* Ability to configure DNS servers based on mDNS/DNS-SD published information, a feature that is very usefull on IPv6 which has no other mechanism for this.
* Combined with nss-mdns, allows hostname lookup such as 'laptop.local' without the configuration of a DNS server.
* Easy integration into GLIB, QT3, QT4 mainloop applications.
* Documentation and examples of both developer APIs and utilities.

mDNS/DNS-SD is part of a larger set of specifications for easy configuration of networking known as "ZeroConf" (http://www.zeroconf.org/), with the aim of allowing you to plug into a network and instantly be able to interact with it's services.

Avahi was designed to be a fully free implementation, and is available under the LGPL. Many other implementations of the mDNS/DNS-SD specification were previously non-free, restricting their use in many platforms such as the GNOME desktop and many distributions.