Cumulus Support

My apologies as this is probably not the right place to ask for help, but I hope someone can please.

I'm having frequent dropouts with CumulusMX which i know isn't a Cumulus problem. I think after a lot of googling it stems from something called avahai daemon which keeps doing this:

Jul 27 10:31:20 raspberrypiSSD avahi-daemon[384]: Leaving mDNS multicast group on interface wlan0.IPv6 with address fe80::d8179dd4:be2.
Jul 27 10:31:20 raspberrypiSSD avahi-daemon[384]: Joining mDNS multicast group on interface wlan0.IPv6 with address fdaa:bbcc:ddee:0:d2c0a6b:a95f.
Jul 27 10:31:20 raspberrypiSSD avahi-daemon[384]: Registering new address record for fdaa:bbcc:ddee:0:d2c0a6b:a95f on wlan0.*.
Jul 27 10:31:20 raspberrypiSSD avahi-daemon[384]: Withdrawing address record for fe80::d8179dd4:be2 on wlan0.

I'm assuming that it happened during an update to the PI. Please does anyone know if I can safely stop the daemon running?
Thank you

The quick answer is that no you cannot easily disable avahi-daemon. It is an integral part of Linux. I have run CMX on Linux (not RPi) without any issues from this or anything else for that matter. I do not allow any of my Linux systems to update automatically, I always do it manually. I'd suggest investigating on the Linux forums for the RPi.

Stuart

This is the Avahi daemon. It is the Linux version of the Apple bonjour. I think CMX uses it for searching your devices to autoconfigure so I would not directly advise to stop it. Besides that, it is default part of what runs in a Linux RPi distri. It would not surprise me if the issue is caused by the v6 address space. I assume Mark will do a better comment.

Thank you for your replies.

Hans, does this mean I’ve done something stupid please? Thank you.

LindaFNM wrote: ↑Wed 27 Jul 2022 10:39 am Hans, does this mean I’ve done something stupid please? Thank you.

Can't compute, I have no idea what you did.
Even if I knew... no doubt you had a reason and logic behind it. Only if you execute random acts on a running system I would use the word stupid, all other acts are correct or ill fated experiments.

btw: if you update the system, do you shutdown CMX and reboot afterwards using the automatic restart? Do you have the latest version of CMX?

Otherwise I havo no idea of the cause nor of a solution other than reinstalling the OS. Can be done but you need to backup/restore and reconfigure the things around CMX. It does not need to take a very long time using the RPi imager.

Hans, thanks once again. I’m afraid most of my dabbling is I’ll fated experiment !

I think I’ll try a full reinstallation as things have become almost unworkable now.

Good

Btw: experimenting benefits of writing down all steps until experiment ends.

Yes, I know, except I've been lazy with this and will now pay That'll teach me..........

On my phone ...
But the service is not used by CMX, it has its own discovery mechanism.

If you do not use IPv6 I would suggest disabling it as the first step. It has caused issues for other people, a search should find you the instructions.

Mark,

Yes, yes yes. Thank you

Quite how that got enabled is anyones guess, but I disabled it and it’s been running happily for several hours.
I’ll add it to the notes I’m now writing for myself…..

Well, that's better than a reinstall
My v6 guess was OK, missed the disabling. Sorry for that but apparently no harm done.

I'm afraid a reinstall may be the answer after all, it stopped again from 17:49 - 17:53. At least it'll clean everything up, I'll tackle it tomorrow. Thank you for your time, and at least I have a full set of notes to work from now.

That avahi-service splits opinions... I just did a new install of one raspberry, and several quite up to date websites instructed to "disable all unnecessary services like avahi". Imho it really shouldn't be needed on anything if you do not use raspberry as an interactive desktop / mediacenter / print server etc.
On the other hand it should not also do any harm unless your router does not behave badly with mDNS.

By the way, Linda did you also stop the avahi-service instead of just disabling it? For me at least it is quite counter-intuitive that disabling a service does not also stop it if it currently is running.

Also disabling the ipv6 is anyway a very good idea for a computer that really does not need it.