MDNS subdomains with Avahi

Question

I have a machine running avahi-daemon on Ubuntu Jaunty. It's currently responding to requests for itself on hostname.local, but I would like it to run a webapp that ends up publishing MDNS addresses for other hosts which aren't on the local network. I would like for these to be in a subdomain of .local, if possible.

Right now, if I edit the /etc/avahi/hosts file and put in an address -> host mapping, it only works if there's no subdomain component. In other words, the FQDN foo.bar.local won't resolve from other hosts, but bar.local will. Is this a limitation of the MDNS clients, or the server? And can it be fixed?

Answer 1

That's a limitation of Avahi daemon's static host functionality. You need to use another method that supports registering more than a single label such as this Python script.