Can Linux mDNS client be "pure" client?

Question

I found some famous mDNS clients, such as nss-mdns, Avahi-browse, are dependent on avahi-daemon. However, if we start avahi-daemon, the client machine also publish its mDNS domain name and become a mDNS server. Is there a mDNS client in Linux that only does the client job?

Answer 1

Have a look at avahi-daemon.conf:

Section [publish] disable-publishing=

Takes a boolean value ("yes" or "no"). If set to "yes", no record will be published by Avahi, not even address records for the local host. Avahi will be started in a querying-only mode. Use this is a security measure. This option defaults to "no".

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So if you edit /etc/avahi/avahi_daemon.conf with

[publish]
disable_publishing=yes

and restart the service (e.g. service avahi-daemon restart), avahi will stop responding to mDNS requests.