• mholiv@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    3
    ·
    17 hours ago

    True. But pinging IPs directly should only be done as a debug step when dns / mdns does not work. Aka extremely rarely.This all being said mdns is extremely reliable on lan. It’s literally just multicast dns on lan.

    On my personal home network I have never had mdns fail in 5-ish years. FQDNs yah. DNS can break. But mdns has been solid.

    • sem@piefed.blahaj.zone
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      4 hours ago

      I would like to know more about this mdns.

      In my experience, the following are unreliable, and it’s unclear which one is supposed to work under which context:

      • ping hostname
      • ping hostname.local
      • ping hostname.<whatever that local domain thing is called>

      While pinging the ipv4 address is reliable; if the device is reachable on the network, it should respond.

      • mholiv@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        edit-2
        2 hours ago

        Happy to help.

        You can find more information here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multicast_DNS

        You can learn how to configure it here: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Avahi

        I see why some people can be confused though. In some distros it needs to be configured. Once you configure it though it should be rock solid.

        There is no reason why an ICMP packet would be more robust than a multicast udp packet.

        The traditional nomenclature is myhostname.local

        Just make sure that the system firewall is configured to allow mdns. That’s the biggest issue. Once you have e that and you have mdns set up it’s good to go.