Removing the avahi-daemon on Ubuntu
Avahi is the open-source implementation of Zeroconf, used for automatic management of networks without any centralized configuration. Generally, Avahi is only useful in small local networks (such as a home LAN).
The avahi-daemon
process handles mDNS, which is used for name resolution and service discovery within the local network. If you don't need its functions, Avahi can be safely removed.
Local name resolution – allows you to reach the computer by a
hostname.local
name without any centralized configuration. Since your server most likely has a DNS name, this function is unnecessary.Service discovery – allows programs to find and advertise running services (for example, to allow listing all SSH or PulseAudio servers in the LAN). This is convenient on a home network, but entirely useless for a datacenter-hosted server. This too can be safely removed.
(Other Avahi components, which are inactive on your server, are avahi-autoipd
for RFC 3927 and avahi-dnsconfd
for discovery of unicast-DNS servers.)
sudo apt-get purge avahi-daemon
To merely disable:
sudo systemctl stop avahi-daemon
sudo systemctl disable avahi-daemon