mDNS stopped working since upgrading to 20.1.3

[alh]

Two weeks ago I upgraded an OPNsense installation from 19.7 to the latest 20.1.3. Since then printers cannot be found using Bonjour/mDNS anymore if they are in a different network. mDNS repeater plugin is installed and appears to be running fine (there is nothing in the logs that suggests otherwise) but the devices don't appear on the clients.

Any idea how to troubleshoot/fix this?

[alh]

For now I solved it by using a Linux box and the avahi package. Any chance of getting an avahi package to OPNsense similar to pfsense?

[fabian]

Probably not - avahi has too many dependencies.

[Gauss23]

Hi,

I´m using OPNSense now as a replacement for a pfSense. I have the same problems with mDNS-repeater.  The project itself looks quite unmaintained.
mDNS-repeater forgets i.e. a HP printer. Printer is powered up and is available on all selected interfaces for around 5 minutes. After that period the connection gets lost. Restarting the Bonjour service on the HP printer makes it working for another 5 minutes.

Avahi makes a much better impression to me. I installed avahi on a Ubuntu 20 box and let it monitor all vlans which have need for mDNS traffic forwarding. Works out of the box without those 5 minute timeouts. Will try to install it from the opnsense-ports. But I don´t want to break anything on my OPNSense.

Is there a chance to get avahi as a plugin? Or at least some investigation why the mDNS-repeater is not working correctly? I want to get rid of this pointless Ubuntu box.

What would be needed to investigate this further?

Best regards

[fabian]

the problem with avahi is, that it pulls in a bunch of dependencies, which was the reason, why we used mdns-repeater. There is another plugin in development, which forwards multicast.

[Gauss23]

Thank you for the fast answer. Now I´m keen on the new plugin 

[franco]

See here https://forum.opnsense.org/index.php?topic=15910.msg77513#msg77513

[Gauss23]

That looks promising. Will try it out today.

Thank you very much!

[Gauss23]

My feedback: new plugin is working good so far.

The recommended options for mDNS include a source-address spoof of 1.1.1.1 (which means set the outgoing interface ip as origin). With this option set it´s like with mDNS-repeater: timeouts after 5 minutes. Leaving source empty solves this for me. No timeouts. Printer is always available at all networks, which are included in the service. 1.1.1.2 isn´t working at all for me. No connection.

Perfect.

As I have no ChromeCast devices this isn´t a deal-breaker for me.

Am I the only one with those 5 minute timeouts with 1.1.1.1 set?

Thank you Fabian and Franco! Great support, great product!

[franco]

Martin and Michael put in the effort to get this included. Credit where credit is due.

We will make the new plugin stable with an upcoming 20.1.x release.


Cheers,
Franco

[Gauss23]

Of course: thank you Martin and Michael for this great plugin! 

[marjohn56]

And Berto, he also had an input.

[Gauss23]

We won´t forget Berto! Thanks! 

[IsaacFL]

I seem to see a lot of requests for Avahi.  I don't understand the hesitancy to create an Avahi package. None of the other solutions proposed here work with ipv6?

Avahi seems to be supported by everywhere (including freebsd) but opnsense and it does work in an ipv6 environment. Avahi seems to be currently updated and supported.

I just would like to get Airprint to work across subnets in ipv6 with Apple products. So open to other suggestions.