On a client machine, I run the following command:
while true ; do ping -c 1 server_name.local. ; sleep 1s ; done
It outputs:
ping: unknown host server_name.local.
...except that when I reboot the server, there are a few successful pings just before shutdown and again right after startup.
Likewise, the diagnostic utility mdns-scan only sees the server while it is rebooting.
What's going on, and how can I make it work more consistently?
The server is running Ubuntu Desktop 11.10.
I found the following message in the /var/log/syslog. But it should be noted that .local seems to work fine for other devices on my network.
Avahi detected that your currently configured local DNS server serves
a domain .local. This is inherently incompatible with Avahi and thus
Avahi disabled itself. If you want to use Avahi in this network, please
contact your administrator and convince him to use a different DNS domain,
since .local should be used exclusively for Zeroconf technology.
For more information, see http://avahi.org/wiki/AvahiAndUnicastDotLocal
