Avahi Server Works at Star

After my failed attempt to get the get the Raspberry Pi running Avahi working on the Star school network, I got some help.  I met up with Chip, our router and networking expert, at Star of Bethlehem to try again.

The first thing we did is changed the name of the device from exodus to acts because exodus was an old server name that the network still remembered.  It was causing problems.  Changing the host name is done in both the /etc/hosts and /etc/hostname files.

Next, we gave the device a fixed IP address by editing the /etc/interfaces/network file.  I had previously setup a fixed address and simply uncommented those lines and commented out the dhcp line.  Rebooted.  The new name and IP address were configured.

Chip went into the DNS program on the Windows 2008 server and cleaned some things up.  There were entries for some old servers that he deleted.  He also added acts as a server in the DNS.

Now that the device was setup properly, and the network issues were fixed, we moved acts to the server rack in the work room and fired it up.  It worked.  PTL!

The next step was to get the Avahi server working with the Cisco router.  Cisco has a web page where they explain how to do this.  We followed the four steps below.  Chip decided to use vlan id 10 on the Pi's IP address.

1. Add the Avahi daemon and VLAN packages to the OS via the sudo apt-get install vlan avahi-daemon commands.
2. Edit the Avahi configuration file and enable the reflector functionality in the Avahi Daemon.
   

   ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo nano /etc/avahi/avahi-daemon.conf

3. Within the configuration file, change the “enable-reflector” option to yes and make sure that no # symbol is before the line.
   

   #publish-domain=yes
   #publish-dns-servers=192.168.50.1, 192.168.50.2
   #publish-resolv-conf-dns-servers=yes
   #publish-aaaa-on-ipv4=yes
   #publish-a-on-ipv6=no
   
   [reflector]
   enable-reflector=yes
   #reflect-ipv=no

4. Issue the sudo vconfig add eth0 10 command in order to add a VLAN:
   

We added the vlan id information to the network file. We then started configuring acts to work with the Cisco switch.  Chip did some stuff on the Cisco switch itself.  I'm not exactly sure what he did but it involved setting up some kind of "route reflector".

The Cisco page tells us to run avahi-browse command to see all apple devices on the network.  However, we had to execute

sudo apt-get install avahi-utils 

before this would work.  These instructions were not on the Cisco instruction page.

Finally, the vconfig command we executed at the command line did not stay after a reboot.  We added the following line to the rc.local file.

sudo vconfig add eth0 10

Chip tested the solution with the teacher who first reported the problem.  It works great.  Problem solved!