Re: Strange 224.0.0.251 address being accessed on bootup

[Nigel Henry <cave.dnb@tiscali.fr>]

On Wednesday 29 August 2007 23:19, Joey Hess wrote:
> Nigel Henry wrote:
> > It obviously didn't work, and appears that
> > if a script is in /etc/init.d, and there are no links to it in the
> > runlevel directories, the script is run anyway.
>
> I think that avahi may be started by /etc/network/if-up.d/avahi-daemon,
> when a network interface is brought up. I'd suggest editing
> /etc/default/avahi-daemon.
>
> BTW, there's a persuasive argument that wanting to disable avahi/mDNS to
> improve your system's security is similar to wanting to disable DNS or
> DHCP to improve your systems's security.
> <http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/zeroconf-ubuntu>

Thanks Joey. I've changed it from 1 to 0 in /etc/default/avahi-daemon, and no 
more messages now. I've also looked at the link you gave. It's a bit late, 
and will look at it again tomorrow. 

My 2 machines are on a LAN which access the Internet through my Smoothwall 
firewall, via a serial modem. As far as I know I havn't been compromised, and 
being on dialup I'm obviously not running webservers, ftpservers, 
mailservers, etc, accessable to the Internet. if I was able to, they would be 
in a DMZ obviously.

I'm not being complacent about security. When anything a bit weird happens, 
I'm always a bit suspicious.

Thanks for your help.

Nigel.