Avahi update causes internet connetions to fail

[John Jefferies]

I'm using Lucid with all updates applied as of a week ago. Everthing on my system was working fine until this mornings system update.

Part of the update was patches to Avahi "Version 0.6.25-1ubuntu6.1". After reboot, I couldn't get onto the internet.

When I looked at ifconfig, I normally have eth2 & lo entries. The problem seems to be a new eth2:avahi entry that had an IP address assigned that isn't in my LAN. The eth2 entry was also there, but didn't have an IP.

I solved this, sort of, by editing /etc/default/avahi-daemon and setting AVAHI_DAEMON_DETECT_LOCAL=0 instead of 1. That's a patch I found on http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1339516 answering "How do I disable Avahi??"

After a reboot, I could connect to the internet again.

However, some things started behaving strangely. Like the colours of everything had changed as though the theme had been changed. Just going into the Preferences/Appearance seemed to be enough to fix it - I didn't have to click anything else. Very odd. Might be related to a different update package.

FWIW. I don't think I need the avahi services from what I understand of it.

I'm running Ubuntu Lucid within a VMware virtual machine on an XP host. It's a laptop, so the network environment does change twice a day. But, as I said, everything was stable until this mornings update.

I've since rolled back to a VM snapshot prior to the update and I'm going to delay updates for a little while, but I can reinstate the snapshot containing the update if necessary.

[John Jefferies (j-jefferies)]

Since reporting this bug, I have been using the VM snapshot taken prior to reporting it. I've now retried adding the avahi updates; and this time I didn't see the same problems.

I haven't a clue what went wrong before, but I'm prepared to accept a cosmic ray as the reason.