Hello Some of you may remember this thread I started earlier this month:
https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2016/12/msg00130.html in which I asked for opinions on the best way to connect a stretch box using WiFi. After being educated by the various responses, I went back and took another look at the box in question and found that not only was NetworkManager installed, but it was being used for the existing connections. So, contrary to what I said towards the end of that thread, I decided to just adjust the NetworkManager config to get the network to work the way I wanted. After some jiggering about I eventually figured out that I had multiple instances of the connection setup to both my main WiFi AP and to the extension AP I had added. Some of those were limited to specific users while others were open to all users. I binned the specific ones and kept the ones that were open to all users, one for each connection. By including the WiFi PSK for each connection (one for the main AP and one for the extension) in the relevant connection config and changing the psk-flags from 1 to 0, I had connections happening automatically at boot instead of waiting for a login. And, by adding to the config files a line saying autoconnect-priority=X I was able to get the machine to favour the extension and fall back to the main AP if the extension is not available. All very nice. However, I now discover that Avahi is not doing its thing properly any more, and other machines on my network cannot see this machine by name. Its IP address right now is 192.168.11.13 and its name is affinity. I have another machine on my network, a jessie box, which is called kazuki and happens to be at IP 192.168.11.4 right now. From kazuki I can ping affinity by IP address, and likewise from affinity I can ping kazuki by IP address, but ping kazuki.local from affinity and ping affinity.local from kazuki both fail with "ping: unknown host X" where X is the machine I am trying to ping, after a pause that suggests some sort of attempt to find the other machine is being made. Before I made the NetworkManager changes on affinity, this would happen sometimes, but if I "woke up" affinity by pinging it by IP address, I could then get the name to resolve. Now I can never get the name to resolve. Anyone got any bright ideas how to figure out what is going on here? Looking in the systemd journal I can't see anything being written when trying to do the lookups. Avahi daemon is starting, healthily as far as I can tell, on both machines. Other machines can look up kazuki on the network by name without problems, eg my wife's iPad which uses it as a print server. So the problem most likely is at the affinity end, but I need help to diagnose it. TIA Mark
