mDNs / Bonjour / Multicast

[drinkingbird]

Mostly, but Apple devices default to that for other services as well (airplay, airprint are a couple of examples).

Also recall also that Win10 uses mDNS for resource discovery as well (along with all the other methods)... Also Linux makes significant use of avahi services, at least with Ubuntu and clones (and it's in every major repo/distro).

Anyways - libnss is already in AsusWRT, it's just missing the libnss-mdns library... in my private exploration of the WiFi bug I mentioned some time back, I dropped libnss-mdns into my private builds, as it made testing much easier...

IIRC - the library might be in Entware if memory serves me right...

But in reality the router doesn't need to support it at all for those other things, they communicate directly. The router having time machine backup to USB support makes sense that they would need it for that.

It would also be needed to support it between guest wireless and main LAN when access intranet is disabled, but having that disabled breaks it anyway so it wouldn't help there.

 

[torch]

Not sure why libnss-mdns would be necessary. Wouldn't most (or all?) mDNS queries be for services not hostname resolution? I don't run any services (such as smb) on my router, but I assume the avahi-daemon is there to respond to mDNS queries for services actually running on the router. I would think queries for hostname resolution would be unicast DNS. What if mDNS hostname does not equal DNS hostname?

 

[drinkingbird]

Not sure why libnss-mdns would be necessary. Wouldn't most (or all?) mDNS queries be for services not hostname resolution? I don't run any services (such as smb) on my router, but I assume the avahi-daemon is there to respond to mDNS queries for services actually running on the router. I would think queries for hostname resolution would be unicast DNS. What if mDNS hostname does not equal DNS hostname?

As far as I've seen all that discovery/response traffic uses the .local hostname so relies on mDNS and doesn't use DNS at all. In a way it makes sense as not all home routers support(ed) local DNS, or aren't configured properly for it to work well, etc. So the theory was to avoid that all together.

 

[Donga120]

Update for those interested:

I am running the iOS 17 beta (time of writing Developer Beta 5). I decided to nuke my old Home (and use a home reset profile provided by Apple) to clear all existing iCloud Home existence and start from scratch.

I setup a new Home and I added my 3 HomePods back (on 5GHz Wi-Fi), it's been a day so far and I have to say they have been working flawlessly with not even a hint of a glitch, music plays back fast, Siri responses are good and always work, AirPlay works to them reliably from my iPhone.

I always thought this was a Home / HomePod / Apple bug and I don't believe the router (ASUS GTAX6000 running rMerlin 3004.388.4 beta 3) has much of an effect, but I wondered if there was anything on the router settings that should or should not be on etc to improve something like this, however I have changed a few settings on my Router, now what difference this has made I don't know, but I am happy to report it is running perfectly.

I did not have too many Home devices so nuking my Home and setting is back up is not much of an issue, and will add devices slowly and see how it goes.

 

[mawa]

I'm running into the same issues, anyone found a solution in the meantime?

 

[Donga120]

I'm running into the same issues, anyone found a solution in the meantime?

Try this. I had an issue a few days ago where disable 160mhz fixed the HP's

5GHz wifi settings:



Professional settings

 

[sfx2000]

Asus routers still run Netatalk (Apple Share File Protocol) for Apple service discovery... AFP has been deprecated for years now, and with Apple Silicon, it's basically not supported.

They have limited Avahi support - Avahi being Bonjour/Rendezvous for Apple devices.

Asus is missing a specific library that would improve things - libnss-mdns

I've mentioned this in the past to @RMerlin - challenge here is that it's hard to test unless one has multiple Apple devices, or devices that support MultiCast DNS for service discovery.

Adding NSS-MDNS is actually trivial, as NSS is already implemented on AsusWRT...

GitHub - avahi/nss-mdns

Contribute to avahi/nss-mdns development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com