It would be sensitive and nice to have Avahi turned on by default

[Pēteris Krišjānis]

Because lot of networks has Macs and PCs with iTunes, it would be nice to have Avahi turned on by default, because it would allow me to turn on Sharing and have fun with other iTunes trough Rhythmbox. Also it is possible that many other apps (GAIM 2 with Bonjour support) will use DNS-DS, so it would be good, somewhere inthe future.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thanks for your bug. That would conflict with the "0 port open" policy and would create some security issues, but we should make easy for users to activate that feature from the UI

[Pēteris Krišjānis (pecisk-gmail)]

I thought about that too. What would be nice something like question in installation about that. Or at least as you said easy way for users who want it to turn it on. Oh, and what could be done for now - install it by default (but not start it), so it can be easily switched on from "Services", as cupsys service for example. For my point of view, it would be good enough for now.

[Lorenzo J. Lucchini (ljl)]

avahi-daemon is now installed and activated by default in KDE 3.5.1, at least for Breezy (kubuntu.org repository).

Is this needed? What does this daemon bring me - note that I don't even have Rythmbox?

[Pēteris Krišjānis (pecisk-gmail)]

* Lot of IM will/already support Bonjour aka zeroconf which Avahi provides;
* Rhythmbox/Bashee support zeroconf discovery of iTunes streams;
* You can enable your envorment/browser to share bookmarks - it could require additional job, but AFAIK, Epiphany already support zeroconf discovery and sharing of bookmarks;

etc. lot of other applications where automatical services discovery could bring lot of benifits, mostly printers, share services, etc.

[Trent Lloyd (lathiat)]

Indeed this would be nice but breaks the 0 open port policy.

For dapper+1, I will integrate a UI to easy enable/disable avahi.

[Pēteris Krišjānis (pecisk-gmail)]

Trent, I would suggest for Dapper include Avahi in default installation, but keep it turned off. It would be possible?

[DarkMageZ (darkmagez)]

"I thought about that too. What would be nice something like question in installation about that. Or at least as you said easy way for users who want it to turn it on. Oh, and what could be done for now - install it by default (but not start it), so it can be easily switched on from "Services", as cupsys service for example. For my point of view, it would be good enough for now."

maybe a similar setup, but instead of the user knowing that they have to turn this thing on, that programs that could benefit from this could query if it is running, and if not, prompt the user about the advantages and disadvantages of turning it on. (i know it could cause alot of programs requiring ubuntu specific patches)

sounds fairly user friendly to me

[Gabriel Bauman (gabrielbauman)]

A "zero-open-port" policy is generally a good thing, but Avahi/MDNS services are beginning to be *expected* by users. I fully expected Avahi to be on by default in Edgy for workstation installations.

Case in point - I impressed a couple of Mac users by showing them that my Ubuntu installation's Rhythmbox could see and play their iTunes shared music.

One of them got excited and installed Ubuntu on a Windows PC he had at home. Avahi was disabled by default; he couldn't figure out why or how to enable it; he quit in disgust, saying "Ubuntu is just not polished enough".

I understand the need for security. Still, burying an 'enable autodiscovery' setting in the Networking capplet is not an intuitive solution for a user that expects things to "just work". Even if they find the setting, how are they supposed to know that turning it on will make their friend's iTunes music available, etc. etc.?

Since we don't want to open ports the user has not explicitly opened, the sensible thing to do would seem to be dedicating a 'page' in the LiveCD graphical installer wizard to explaining MDNS's risks and benefits, and allowing the user to enable or disable it for their new installation.

Once Ubuntu is installed, it's really too late.

[Michael R. Head (burner)]

It's certainly expected that if I install the avahi-daemon package that it would run and listen.

It's particularly annoying for upgrades. It's always the one manual fix I forget when doing a dapper-edgy update (that is, to turn avahi on).