Ubuntu cannot Ping a FQDN when avahi-daemon is running

Written by James McDonald

June 4, 2009

My work laptop recently suffered a massive loss of disk space on the Windows XP partition resulting in Ubuntu 9.04 appearing in the boot menu 🙂 but I ran into a …

Problem:
I was trying to setup Evolution Exchange by entering the Exchange Server name using the Fully Qualified Domain Name “server1.domainname.local” in the settings. For some weird reason Evolution wouldn’t connect to my exchange server. Changing the email server name to simply the hostname eg. ‘server1’ worked.

The problem was compounded because once Evolution Exchange connects to your exchange server it pulls some settings from the exchange server and then populates the Global Catalog field (used for Active Directory Address lookups) in your Evolution setup with the provided “server1.domainname.local” address and again Evolution can’t query the global catalog when using the FQDN.

My resolv.conf has:
# Generated by NetworkManager
domain domainname.local
search domainname.local
nameserver 10.253.238.252

Trying:

ping server1                   # worked
ping server1.domainname.local  # fails to resolve the address
ping server1.domainname.local. # (a dot on the end to tell it that it's fully
                               # qualified and it shouldn't append the
                               # "domain" or "search" options) didn't work.

And you would think that it would work both ways

What the heck was going on? Until I read this post and this one which explains the reason why avahi interferes with a domain with a .local suffix

It seems the avahi-daemon interferes with the normal resolving process. It’s DNS caching borks the normal functionality

The fix:

# shut it down
sudo /etc/init.d/avahi-daemon stop
# stop it starting at the next reboot by removing the startup links
sudo update-rc.d -f avahi-daemon remove
 Removing any system startup links for /etc/init.d/avahi-daemon ...
   /etc/rc1.d/K86avahi-daemon
   /etc/rc2.d/S50avahi-daemon
   /etc/rc3.d/S50avahi-daemon
   /etc/rc4.d/S50avahi-daemon
   /etc/rc5.d/S50avahi-daemon

If you want to keep avahi running because of the need to keep the zeroconf functionality check this out

1 Comment

  1. effe

    Thanks! Just ran into the same problem. Been searching for an hour until I found your suggestion. You shall have a thanks.

    Reply

Submit a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

The reCAPTCHA verification period has expired. Please reload the page.

You May Also Like…

McDonald’s has Ubuntu

Walked in to the McCafe at Greenhills and the screen had Ubuntu running. McOpen Source - Would you like Fries with...

Ubuntu Math

The version number of Ubuntu is 9.04 and is based on the year and month of release. So 9.04 means 2009 month 04...