Automatic .local and .lan hostnames

I have a Raspberry Pi on my local network that acts as an MPD server. It's hostname is "pib". I have, for about a year and a half, been referencing it from other machines on the local network as "pib.local". Yesterday, one of the machines stopped being able to find "pib.local" but can now connect to "pib.lan" - which I don't think used to work. I've never set up my local machines to provide <hostname>.local or <hostname>.lan addresses, it seems to be an automatic service of both Fedora and Debian (or Raspbian). And I've always had problems with its indecisiveness about "is it .lan, or is it .local?" For some machines it's one, for some machines it's the other. But I think this is the first time it's switched. And no, I didn't make any configuration changes (or software upgrades) on the machine that switched. So now I'm really interested in how these names are made available. I don't care which of the two names it provides, but I'd really, really like it to do it consistently. Can someone point me in the right direction, and I'll go do my homework. Thanks. -- Giles https://www.gilesorr.com/ gilesorr@gmail.com

On 2020-05-27 11:29 AM, Giles Orr via talk wrote:
So now I'm really interested in how these names are made available. I don't care which of the two names it provides, but I'd really, really like it to do it consistently. Can someone point me in the right direction, and I'll go do my homework. Thanks.
Probablly mDNS. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multicast_DNS

On Wed, 27 May 2020 at 11:31, James Knott via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:
On 2020-05-27 11:29 AM, Giles Orr via talk wrote:
So now I'm really interested in how these names are made available. I don't care which of the two names it provides, but I'd really, really like it to do it consistently. Can someone point me in the right direction, and I'll go do my homework. Thanks.
Probablly mDNS. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multicast_DNS
Thanks, that's a perfect point of entry. It sent me to Avahi, a name I've been aware of for years but never previously investigated. And from there I discovered that 'systemctl status avahi.daemon' on the Pi shows that the service died about a day and a half ago. So I have my work cut out for me trying to figure out why it died. Is a restart sufficient, or will it happen again? Etc. -- Giles https://www.gilesorr.com/ gilesorr@gmail.com
participants (2)
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Giles Orr
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James Knott