The Avahi daemon discovers network resources, allocates IP addresses without the DHCP server, makes the computer accessible by its local machine name by acting as a DNS server and facilitates sharing of files and printers. The Avahi daemon is a default daemon in Linux and uses system resources and reduces the network performance. Disabling the Avahi daemon cannot be done by un-checking it from the list of system services. To disable Avahi from Ubuntu systems, the avahi-daemon file has to be modified. At Debian Linux operating systems follows the same procedure, but the name of the daemon may be different. The avahi-discover and the service discovery applet are the packages which are available for Avahi.
The Avahi daemon is present as default and allows you to discover network resources and get connected to them.
Its primary roles are to:
It has been reported in some cases to decrease network performance.
If you want to disable it it is not enough to disable it from the list of services. You need to:
sudo gedit /etc/default/avahi-daemon
Note: The command sudo update-rc.d-f avahi-daemon remove is not enough to disable the Avahi Daemon.
The name of daemon may be different but the method remains the same for Debian-based systems:
sudo update-rc.d -f avahi-daemon remove
sudo update-rc.d avahi-daemon defaults
The service-discovery-applet allows you to discover available services on the network and connect easily.
The avahi-discover application allows you to browse the available services.
gnome-user-share can easily share files via WebDAV (Apache2) with Avahi.
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