[libvirt] Turning off libvirtd mdns by default

[Doug Goldstein]

On Mon, Mar 26, 2012 at 2:31 PM, Stef Walter <stefw at gnome.org> wrote:
> In the GNOME UI we'd like to make use of Avahi discovery and name resolution
> "out of the box". A typical use case is for discovery of printers that are
> advertised using MDNS. This should work even on potentially 'hostile'
> networks such as a wireless access point in a print shop or airport. It
> should work without user configuration.
>
> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Desktop/Whiteboards/AvahiDefault
>
> In order to turn on Avahi by default, and make it work by default, we'd like
> to make it possible to use Avahi without advertising any information to the
> network by default. Advertising information to the network (even the host
> name) without the user's configuration or consent is a privacy issue.
>
> libvirtd advertises itself via MDNS on the network by default. I understand
> that MDNS discovery of libvirtd is really handy in many cases.
>
> However since one has to configure network access in libvirtd anyway  --
> none of the access methods work "out of the box" to my understanding -- I'd
> like to suggest turning off libvirtd's MDNS publishing by default. As part
> of setting up libvirtd for network access, the user would turn on mdns_adv.
>
> I hope that makes sense. Let me know if I've gotten something wrong.
>
> Would you accept a patch to do this? Or would you suggest that we try and do
> this downstream in the Fedora/RHEL packages instead?
>
> Cheers,
>
> Stef
>

A bit off topic for this list but I hope you're adding the ability to
configure a network as a friendly/trusted network vs a hostile
network. Similar to what Windows has when you connect it to a new
network. If you let it know that you're on a friendly network there
should be some way to enable all these services to auto-advertise
themselves. Otherwise they will becoming an annoying mess of having to
enable every service in every way to advertise itself.

-- 
Doug Goldstein