Bob Goodwin wrote on Sunday 04 November 2007: > >>>> It appears that I [192.168.1.6] am the source of them? Should > >>>> I have 5353 open? What is their significance? > > As Luciano pointed out, it is the mDNS service. Therefor you probably > > have an active mDNS server instance (e.g. avahi) which announces your > > machine throughout the local network. > Should I open this port? would it benefit the Windows and Mac users on > my LAN? If so will it do that without increasing traffic to and from > my ISP? You benefit depends on your network infrastructure. If you already have a DNS server then there is no benefit. If you don't have a DNS then using avahi along with nss-mdns give you dynamic IP resolving. For Windows Apple's implementation of Zeroconf (namely: Bonjour) is available. For Mac, well... batteries included. ;) For example you can tell avahi to use a domain like .lan (or .local or .bunny or ...) for mDNS announces. Then a host name like "computer.lan" can be resolved to its IP address. You also get a service discovery feature. With avahi installed an application can talk to it on the DBUS and for example annouce "I'm a webserver listening on port 8080". Another application on another host can ask its own avahi for available services and make use of them. Avahi can be configured to announce services for application which cannot (yet) talk to it on DBUS, or even for apps running on another host. Example: If you install Bonjour on a Windows machine, a plugin for Internet Explorer will be installed presenting available WWW servers. Still: if you have a small home network of at most 5 computers there is very little advantage. And DNS-SD (DNS Service Discovery) only works on the local net, it does not pass network boundaries or dial-up-connections (Multicast feature must be available). > Googling mdns has not been very helpful in answering my questions ... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MDNS -- bye, Adalbert Duckies are fun!
