Zeroconf .local support

[Heath Raftery]

Often I connect a new Conduit to an old network or an old Conduit to a new network, and find myself doing the find-the-IP-address dance. I’ve long been a fan of Zeroconf (aka Bonjour aka mDNS aka Avahi) and recently rediscovered the delight when connecting to a dusty old Beaglebone required nothing more than connecting an Ethernet cable and typing ssh debian@beaglebone.local.

So I thought I’d have a crack at installing Zeroconf support on the Conduit. Alas I got as far as identifying mLinux’s roots in Yocto/OpenEmbedded, discovering Avahi is the usual way, and then coming up with naught:

opkg list avahi*
opkg list mdns*
opkg list nss*

No results! Anyone got any further, or can suggest whether it would be worth trying to add the Avahi package manually?

[Christopher Hunt]

I realise that this is an old post, but I’d like to add that having mDNS available to mLinux would be super helpful for the lora components. In particular, the packet-forwarder in being able to locate a remote network server on my LAN. As it stands, I have to configure the network server to have a static IP address. I’d prefer not to as it means that I have to perform remote configuration on-site with my customer once the equipment has been provided to them.

Is there any chance that mDNS could be made available? I’m using varying versions of mLinux – the one I have in front of me is 4.0.1.

Thanks for any response on this topic.

[Christopher Hunt]

Just to add, in terms of what I’ve tried so far:

1. added to /etc/opkg/mlinux-feed.conf:

src/gz openwrt-arm926ejste https://downloads.openwrt.org/releases/packages-18.06/arm_arm926ej-s/packages

2. ran opkg update and saw the above download the package info

3. ran opkg install avahi-utils

Unfortunately, step 3 yields, “opkg_prepare_url_for_install: Couldn’t find anything to satisfy ‘avahi-utils'”. This is mysterious to me… any help here appreciated as avahi-utils appears to exist in that openwrt package repo. Thanks.

• This reply was modified 4 years, 2 months ago by Christopher Hunt.
• This reply was modified 4 years, 2 months ago by Christopher Hunt.
• This reply was modified 4 years, 2 months ago by Christopher Hunt.

[Jeff Hatch]

Christopher,

I have been able to reproduce the same thing. The interesting thing is that when I added the openwrt line to the mlinux-feed.conf and do an opkg list, I can see a lot of openwrt stuff that got pulled in from the Packages.gz, but the avahi stuff isn’t there. If I have time I will dig a little more.

Jeff

[Christopher Hunt]

Thanks Jeff. I did dig a little further – it appears that the architecture name that OpenWRT uses is formatted differently. They use arm_arm926ej-s whereas Multitech use arm926ejste. Adding arm_arm926ej-s to /etc/opkg/arch.conf located avahi-utils but it then tripped up looking for libc:

Collected errors:
* calculate_dependencies_for: Cannot satisfy the following dependencies for avahi-utils:
* libc * libc * libc * libc * libc * librt * libc * libc *

…which doesn’t appear to be in the OpenWRT repo…

Would it be possible to ask around within your engineering group? mDNS would be super useful. Thanks for your help.

[Jason Reiss]

I am able to compile this package in mLinux. The avahi depends are also built.

MACHINE=mtcdt bitbake -c compile libnss-mdns

http://www.multitech.net/developer/software/mlinux/
http://www.multitech.net/developer/software/mlinux/mlinux-building-images/building-a-custom-linux-image/

[Christopher Hunt]

Thanks, Jason – any chance that these builds can be made available from the Multitech repositories? I’ve not yet set myself up for building my own images, although of course, I will if that’s what it comes down to. Clearly, there’s potential interest for mDNS on the Multitech devices. Thanks.

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