What is the purpose of mDNS
Hi,
What is the purpose of mDNS ?
It seems to be for multicast?
Does that mean its usage would be to say send video to a group of workstations all at the same time? Like a corporate wide message from the CEO?
What other use?
It does not seem to be a unicast DNS system. That is a DNS system to find the IP address of a singular workstation/device on the network?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multicast_DNS
By default, mDNS exclusively resolves hostnames ending with the .local top-level domain. This can cause problems if .local includes hosts that do not implement mDNS but that can be found via a conventional unicast DNS server. Resolving such conflicts requires network-configuration changes that mDNS was designed to avoid.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Avahi#Hostname_resolution
2.1.1 Configuring mDNS for custom TLD
The mdns_minimal module handles queries for the .local TLD only. Note the [NOTFOUND=return], which specifies that if mdns_minimal cannot find *.local, it will not continue to search for it in dns, myhostname, etc.
https://www.ncsc.gov.ie/emailsfrom/Shadowserver/DoS/mDNS/
DNS listens on port 53/UDP while mDNS listens on port 5353/UDP. DNS primarily uses point-to-point (unicast) communication with each DNS query sent to a specific IP address while mDNS uses point-to-multipoint (multicast) communication with the mDNS query sent to each devices on the local area network with the reserved mDNS multicast IPv4 address of 224.0.0.251.
George.
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