Disabling the Avahi daemon

Avahi is a daemon that allows you to automatically discover network resources and to connect to it.
Avahi deals with the following:

• To assign an IP address automatically even without the presence of a DHCP server
• To act as a DNS (each machine can be accessed by the name nomMachine.local)
• Publishing services and easy access (to the local network machines are warned of the arrival or departure of a service).

This facilitates file sharing, printer, etc..
Avahi is an implementation of Zeroconf protocol, compatible with Bonjour / Rendez-Vous d'Apple.


However:

• It consumes little memory (about 248 KB).
• It opens 2 network ports (UDP 5353 and 32768)
• It has been reported in some cases a slower network.

Ubuntu 7.04

If you do not need and you want to disable it, you have a problem:
Even if you uncheck in the list of services (Menu System> Administration> Services), will continue to start!

To really turn it off, edit the file /etc/default/avahi-daemon as root:

sudo gedit /etc/default/avahi-daemon

Change the line: AVAHI_DAEMON_START=1
To: AVAHI_DAEMON_START=0

Avahi Daemon wont run at the next startup.

Ubuntu 7.10,8.04 and 8.10

You can go through the service panel to cut Avahi normally:
Menu System> Administration> Services

Other Debian systems and derivatives

The name daemon may be different but the method is the same for Debian based systems

Another method is much simpler to run a command that will delete the links to the daemon

sudo update-rc.d -f avahi-daemon remove

To recreate links use this command:

sudo update-rc.d avahi-daemon defaults

Note: Under Ubuntu 7.04, the command sudo update-rc.d-f avahi-daemon remove not enough to eliminate the Avahi daemon: It will start anyway. Use the tip of AVAHI_DAEMON_START = 0.

Links

About Avahi, there are debian packages available:

• Gnome applet service-discovery-applet to discover services available on the network and connect easily.
• The avahi-discover program allows you to browse the available services.
• gshare lets you easily share files via FTP with Avahi.
• gnome-user-share allows to easily share files over WebDAV (with Apache2) with Avahi.