RPi Avahi Server Works at My House

In my post from this morning, I documented the frustrating and ultimately fruitless work to get a Raspberry Pi device running Avahi (henceforth referred to as "exodus") working on the network, at my kid's school, Star of Bethlehem.  I had to give up because the Star network stopped working for my laptop, and I was hungry, and I had to get a haircut before going to Jacob's basketball game.

On the way out of the school office, I noticed that the power cord for the wireless access point in the office had come unplugged.  That could be why my laptop could not get to the network over wireless.  It may account for the problems I had in the last few minutes at Star.  However, it does not explain why I could not connect to the pi at exodus.local at Star.

Enough of the painful reminiscing.

This evening, I brought exodus home and hooked it up to my tiny area network (TAN).  I reinstalled avahi and started the daemon.  I was immediately able to ping exodus.local as well as ssh to exodus at that hostname.  Everything works as it should.  I'm not sure if I am happy about that or not.  I must admit that part of me is frustrated that it did not just work like this at Star.  It really should be this easy.

Just to see what would happen, I changed the host name in /etc/hostnames and /etc/host to cappucino and rebooted exodus.  I was immediately able to ping cappucino.local with absolutely no issues.  I also used ssh to connect to cappucino.local.  Again, no problems.

Changed the host name back to exodus and rebooted.  Had no problems pinging exodus.local.  No problems using ssh either.

I guess I'll take exodus back to Star next week and try again.