Avahi-daemon and dbus issue

Installing and Using OpenWrt
1

Hi

since I updated to 25.12.2 from 24.xx after used owut upgrade. I’ve used it for a week, however, I noticed my iphone couldn’t connect to Brother printer at all. I checked and see if avahi-daemon is running and it says it’s not running and I found out that avahi-daemon required dbus, so I tried ran /etc/init.d/dbus start but it says this “chown: unknown user/group dbus:dbus”. How do I fix this?

I have installed packages:

avahi-dbus-daemon, avahi-utils, ksmbd-avahi-service, libavahi-client, libavahi-dbus-support, and nut-avahi-service.

Thanks.

2

Avahi and dbus are quite heavy for a plastic router, are you sure that you really need it and that umdns isn't sufficient?

3

I’m running on x86 lenovo M720q. Yes, I need it for VLANs for smart devices, IOTs, and printer. I never tried umdns before, but based on my research. I’m not sure if umdns is really works well with VLAN or not.

4

https://github.com/openwrt/packages/tree/master/net/mdns-repeater is a more light-weight alternative if you only need mdns reflection.

5

I know that umdns 'works' for the easy cases, and I know that many others are using it in combination with reflectors.

Yes, on general purpose linux, avahi would be the weapon of choice, but as you are seeing, it's apparently not getting the testing it would need (and dbus might also 'prefer' more kernel features and systemd integration than default OpenWrt will deliver).

That's why I'm suggesting the well-known/ better tested alternative for OpenWrt. Yes, either 'should' work and bugs should be reported and fixed, but if you want to be pragmatic...

6

I have been using the avahi-nodbus-daemon package (without dbus overhead) successfully for years in my VLAN-segmented environment – the configuration is quite straightforward, for example:

~# cat /etc/avahi/avahi-daemon.conf 
[server]
allow-interfaces=br-lan.10,br-lan.20,br-lan.30,wg0
allow-point-to-point=yes
use-ipv4=yes
use-ipv6=yes
check-response-ttl=no
use-iff-running=no

[publish]
publish-addresses=yes
publish-hinfo=yes
publish-workstation=yes
publish-domain=no

[reflector]
enable-reflector=yes
reflect-ipv=yes

[rlimits]
rlimit-core=0
rlimit-data=4194304
rlimit-fsize=0
rlimit-nofile=512
rlimit-stack=4194304
rlimit-nproc=3
7

Hmm, interesting. I didn’t know avahi can be running without dbus. Thank you. I will try to switch and test from avahi-dbus-daemon to avahi-nodbus-daemon as soon as 25.12.3 become available later on this weekend or so.