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Disabling the Avahi daemon

Latest update on by Irene Burn .

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.

Intro

The Avahi daemon is present as default and allows you to discover network resources and get connected to them.

Its primary roles are to:

  • Assign an IP address automatically, even without the presence of a DHCP server.
  • Act as DNS (each machine is accessible by the name nameMachine.local).
  • Publish services and facilitate access.

Avahi is an implementation of the Zeroconf protocol.

Possible drawbacks of Avahi

  • It takes up memory (about 248kb)
  • It opens 2 network ports (UDP 32768 and 5353)

  • It has been reported in some cases to decrease network performance.

Disable the Avahi Daemon

Under Ubuntu 7.04

If you want to disable it it is not enough to disable it from the list of services. You need to:

  • Edit the /etc/default/ avahi-daemon file: 
    • sudo gedit /etc/default/avahi-daemon
    • Change the line: AVAHI_DAEMON_START = 1
    • to: AVAHI_DAEMON_START = 0
  • Reboot your system

  • Note: The command sudo update-rc.d-f avahi-daemon remove is not enough to disable the Avahi Daemon.

Under Ubuntu 7.10

  • Go to the list of services to disable Avahi:
    • System Menu > Administration > Services

Under Debian systems

  • 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
  • To recreate the used links: 
    • sudo update-rc.d avahi-daemon defaults

Additional information

  • There are some Debian packages available for Avahi:

    • 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.

    • gshare allows you easily share files via FTP with Avahi.

    • gnome-user-share can easily share files via WebDAV (Apache2) with Avahi.

Image: © Unsplash

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This document, titled « Disabling the Avahi daemon », is available under the Creative Commons license. Any copy, reuse, or modification of the content should be sufficiently credited to CCM (ccm.net).

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