Installing nss_mdns without ports

[DominikHoffmann]

In a previous post I was wondering, why the pfSense shell doesn’t see the Macs on the network, when referenced as mymac.local.

Per a post I found through Google, I determined that the likely cause is that the Avahi package that is standard with pfSense does not include nss_mdns. It can be downloaded from the author’s site.

Now I am wondering, whether I am going to mess up the whole environment, if I do

make config-recursive

and

make install clean

?

[doktornotor]

Perhaps you could just use DNS like everyone else? (Oh right, that's not the Bitten Fruit way of doing things…)

[kpa]

At minimum you have to pay attention to the FreeBSD specific patches for the port, they are there for a good reason.

https://svnweb.freebsd.org/ports/head/dns/nss_mdns/files/

Just imo but what you're after is not worth the trouble, mDNS browsing is nice for finding file servers for example from client system on the same LAN but I can't come up with a real reason to do that from a firewall/router. You are going to know what address to connect to without mDNS.

[DominikHoffmann]

@kpa:

Just imo but what you're after is not worth the trouble, mDNS browsing is nice for finding file servers for example from client system on the same LAN but I can't come up with a real reason to do that from a firewall/router. You are going to know what address to connect to without mDNS.

I am frequently on the road, when my kids or my wife need me to fix something on their computers, because, for example, their online class just went down. Because they have laptops, I want them to get their IP addresses via DHCP. Logging into the router via ssh I can tunnel a VNC session through to their computers and take over to fix things. Finding their IP addresses first makes this much slower, and with them being in an online class every minute counts.

[doktornotor]

How does using mymac.local make things slower as opposed to mymac.example.com? :o DNS works just fine with DHCP.

[kpa]

Stop overthinking something that already has a very simple solution, pfSense offers you static DCHP leases and automatically set up DNS records for the static leases. Use them.