Ubuntu

How to make avahi chatty about its services?

Asked by Brewster Malevich

My wife's Mac is very chatty about its services. I can see its services announced in avahi-browse and simply through network:/// in Nautilus.

Now I have this crusty old server that, lets say, I want to use to serve ftp to my LAN. How do I get the computer to announce/publish the services it provides? I'm assuming that this has something to do with avahi-daemon.conf...?

I would like to be able to see this server in network:/// is this do-able?

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Jeruvy (jeruvy) said : 		#1

Forgive me in advance if I'm not totally understanding your needs.

In most cases UPnP or Bonjour in Apple-speak are the 'chatty' services I believe you are referring to and normally handle this for broadcasting of various network services. The way I normally have 'seeable' access to my FTP servers is to use the Places menu in the top panel to create a connection to the device and simply 'add a bookmark' enabled so that I can return here to re-enable it's access should it disappear (due to a reboot for instance).

Hope I'm on the right track :)

Good luck.

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Brewster Malevich (brews) said : 		#2

Nope, I can do that. I normally work from the command line or by bookmarking if I need a GUI. What you're describing works fine.

In simplest example:
In a command line, typing:
avahi-browse -a
Gives me a list of avahi services provided by various computers over my LAN...
It will show that the Ubuntu workstations exist and have avahi daemon running. My wife's mac, however, advertises, not only that it is a workstation but also that it is available for: SSH, SFTP, and CUPS ("Internet Printer") services. My other ubuntu machines may have these services, but avahi doesn't talk about it.
This is also reflected to a degree in the nautilus "Network" folder...
Thus: How do I make avahi more chatty about its services on Ubuntu.

Thanks for all your help :-D

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Brewster Malevich (brews) said : 		#3

I've found my answer.
Props to furicle on identi.ca for his sage-like advice:
To make a system advertise its sftp service for example, I would need to make a file 'sftp-ssh.service' in '/etc/avahi/services'.

This file contains:
<service-group><name replace-wildcards="yes">%h</name> <service><type>_sftp-ssh._tcp</type><port>22</port></service></service-group>

See the man page for 'avahi.service' for explanation of the xml tags.