[avahi] Ubuntu 18 on EC2, Avahi doesn't work

[Andrew Stuart]

I’ve spent all day on this without success.

I’ve boiled the test down to this:

** start two brand new clean EC2 instances running Ubuntu 18.04
** both instances are started in the same VPC and same subnet so they should be on the same local network
** sudo apt install avahi-daemon

ps ax on machine 1 shows:
1847 ? Ss 0:00 avahi-daemon: running [ip-10-0-0-72.local]

ps ax on machine 2 shows:
1866 ? Ss 0:00 avahi-daemon: running [ip-10-0-0-124.local]

A direct ping using ip addresses between the machines works.

Nothing I do makes allows me to see the other machine using hostname.local

I’ve read vast number of web pages and spent 12 hours fiddling with every possible setting I can find to make them talk to each other.

Can anyone help?

thanks

Andrew

[Andrew Stuart]

With some further information being that the problem is the same on Ubuntu 16.04

But on Ubuntu 14, a one line install of

sudo apt install avahi-daemon

results in instantly being able to ping the other machine using its .local address

[Andrew Stuart]

OK it appears that Amazon EC2 does not support multicast which I presume is a requirement for avavhi to work?

Thus I’m guessing there’s no way it could work, and I must have been mistaken about it wrking on Ubuntu 14.

Sorry for the mailing list noise.

thanks

Andrew

[Tom Pusateri]

Post by Andrew Stuart
OK it appears that Amazon EC2 does not support multicast which I presume is a requirement for avavhi to work?
Thus I’m guessing there’s no way it could work, and I must have been mistaken about it wrking on Ubuntu 14.
Sorry for the mailing list noise.
thanks
Andrew

There are other cloud providers such as Rackspace (no affiliation) that do support multicast:

https://community.rackspace.com/products/f/public-cloud-forum/3946/multicast-support-in-cloud-server---ubuntu-apache-tomcat <https://community.rackspace.com/products/f/public-cloud-forum/3946/multicast-support-in-cloud-server---ubuntu-apache-tomcat>

That doesn’t help if you don’t want to migrate to a new provider but maybe you have access to other providers that do support multicast.

Tom