Foole's Journal: Woolly Thinking

I'm posting this in case someone else has the same issue.

I tried installing Avahi recently. After dpkg or whatever installed it, I saw this:

Starting Avahi mDNS/DNS-SD Daemon: avahi-daemonTimeout reached while wating for return value
Could not receive return value from daemon process.
failed!

Not very helpful. Running the daemon directly gave me this:

# avahi-daemon
Process 14569 died: No such process; removing PID file. (/var/run/avahi-daemon//pid)
Found user 'avahi' (UID 107) and group 'avahi' (GID 109).
Successfully dropped root privileges.
avahi-daemon 0.6.10 starting up.
Successfully called chroot().
Successfully dropped remaining capabilities.
Loading service file /services/ssh.service.
netlink.c: bind(): Operation not permitted
avahi-daemon: starting up: iface-linux.c:350: avahi_interface_monitor_sync: Assertion `m' failed.
Aborted

I'm pretty sure I have netlink support (/proc/net/netlink exists). Lots of googling of these error messages gave me nothing.

By chance I found this post which explained everything. Because I'm running a 2.4 kernel, only root can bind to netlink. Adding the --no-drop-root option to the command line fixed everything.

Now I just need to find a use for Avahi...