Avahi

[Guest Richard]

Hi,

First of all I love the Armbian distro on Orange Pi / H3. It's the best out there and what was missing from the beginning. Awesome job.

Quick question: is there any reason why Armbian doesn't have Avahi preinstalled by default ? Of course there's no pb adding it afterward but it would be pretty convenient when working with a headless setup.

Just curious,

Thanks,

Richard

[tkaiser]

Oh, you wouldn't believe how many network admins hate Bonjour/avahi (and any sorts of auto configuration stuff)

 

While i agree that having avahi-daemon enabled from the very beginning would be nice it's still a problem adding packets since we also want to stay 'slim' (Ubuntu Xenial for example wants to install the following packages together with avahi-daemon: bind9-host, geoip-database, libavahi-common-data, libavahi-common3, libavahi-core7, libbind9-140, libdaemon0, libdns162, libgeoip1, libisc160, libisccc140, libisccfg140, liblwres141 and libnss-mdns wasting an additional 10MB)

 

To understand what your request is about... you want to be able to do an

avahi-browse -rtkp _armbian-ssh._tcp

for example to find the board?

 

I didn't care that much in the past since in the installations where we deploy boards it's both easy to quickly scan the DHCP range (nmap -sV -p 22 192.168.$subnet.1-254) and when it's about one board and a DHCP server implementing dynamic DNS updates then it's also easy to  connect to the Armbian installation since an Orange Pi PC will then be accessible using

slogin -l root orangepipc

(if you look at all the fex files here you get the names of every board we support since we set this name as hostname). Or is your situation different and no DHCP server is available and it's really about Zeroconf networking?

[rodolfo]

Oh, you wouldn't believe how many network admins hate Bonjour/avahi (and any sorts of auto configuration stuff)

 

Please, please spare us any sort of "auto-configuration" and thank you for keeping Armbian straight and simple! I am currently testing Armbian_5.05 on OrangePiOne using the jessie server version as a basis. Adding needed packages one by one, the restricted ressources should be best used for production use cases.

 

By far the easiest ways to "find" a headless server is to look at the end of the serial console cable attached to it  or ssh to a STATIC IP configured in /etc/network/interfaces.

[tkaiser]

STATIC IP configured in /etc/network/interfaces.

 

When did we do that the last time? Ah, that must have be Stone Age or was it already the Dark Ages?

 

That reminds me to check u-boot's algorithm to generate the MAC address based on sunxi SoC's SID to create dnsmasq entries automagically based on the SID of the board in question. 

 

BTW: One of the many Armbian advantages is the ability to deploy devices headless without crap like connecting a serial console first or fiddle around in configuration files. And static IP addresses can be assigned in a central location and not by editing text files on a bunch of devices. It's 2016 and not 1970 any more!

[Guest Richard]

Hi,

Nope, it's exactly the same situation :-)

I just like the simplicity of doing ssh root@orangepione.local.

I didn't know nmap (I'm on OS X). Just installed. Works like a charm.

Thanks again for this awesome distort,

Richard

[tkaiser]

I just like the simplicity of doing ssh root@orangepione.local.

I didn't know nmap (I'm on OS X). Just installed. Works like a charm.

 

Well, if the DHCP server in question doesn't suck then it's actually just a 'ssh root@orangepione' instead if you're in the same network (search domain will be appended automagically). And good you already managed to install nmap ('brew install nmap'?)

 

I just had a look into it and using this approach (scanning the subnet with nmap, getting the MAC address, automating 1st login with expect and adding then Banner /root/.configured to /etc/ssh/sshd_config to prevent further configuration attemps) seems even more easy than checking the SID before.

[Guest rodolfo]

When did we do that the last time? Ah, that must have be Stone Age or was it already the Dark Ages?

 

BTW: One of the many Armbian advantages is the ability to deploy devices headless without crap like connecting a serial console first

 

It was probably well before the Jurassic period that some practically minded person plugged in a serial console cable to find out why the automagically generated miracles failed to warm up some half-bricked paperweight in running experiments on unsupported Chinaware.

 

I'm looking forward to the first OPI distro with a post-Jurassic kernel and elementary driver support. Nothing beats working SATA, USB, LAN, WIFI, GPIO.  

[zador.blood.stained]

I'm looking forward to the first OPI distro with a post-Jurassic kernel and elementary driver support. Nothing beats working SATA, USB, LAN, WIFI, GPIO.  

 

Then I'm looking forward to complete H3 support in mainline kernel appearing tomorrow out of thin air.    Maybe then I'll even buy some H3 based Orange device to play with.