Avahi not providing access to local Macs

DominikHoffmann

I just installed the Avahi package on 2.3.3-RELEASE-p1 and enabled it in Services→Avahi.

I had expected to ssh into the pfSense box, get to the shell and do something like

ping mymacbookpro.local

However, the response is

ping: cannot resolve mymacbookpro.local: Unknown host

So, either things are not fully configured, or I don’t understand well enough, how Avahi works, or both.

Does anyone have an idea of what to do?

jimp

The firewall itself isn't going to use mDNS for resolution. Avahi is primarily for allowing mDNS on different network segments to see each other.

Though there are ways to get a FreeBSD host to resolve via mdns, we don't include support for any of those at this time, even via packages.

DominikHoffmann

Lack of official support notwithstanding, I am going to try to get it to work.

On http://www.alexforencich.com/wiki/en/freebsd/installing_avahi I found instructions on how to install Avahi on FreeBSD. Seeing that the Avahi deamon is already running on my pfSense box, I may just have to edit the hosts line in /etc/nsswitch.conf.

I established that the deamon is running by issuing the```
avahi-browse -a

ssh admin@router.local


Since I can’t currently reboot the box, I can’t test, whether editing /etc/nsswitch.conf will be all that is necessary.

For now I can access the WebConfigurator by going to [https://router.local](https://router.local). However, it presents me with

![](https://image.ibb.co/k9zR8v/potential_dns_rebind_attack.png)

At least it’s a start.