MDNSD(8) Maintenance Commands and Procedures MDNSD(8)

mdnsd — Multicast and Unicast DNS daemon

mdnsd

mdnsd (also known as mDNSResponder on some systems) is a daemon invoked at boot time to implement Multicast DNS and DNS Service Discovery.

mdnsd listens on UDP port 5353 for Multicast DNS Query packets. When it receives a query for which it knows an answer, mdnsd issues the appropriate Multicast DNS Reply packet.

mdnsd also performs Unicast and Multicast DNS Queries on behalf of client processes, and maintains a cache of the replies.

mdnsd has no user-specifiable command-line argument, and users should not run mdnsd manually.

There are several methods with which to examine mdnsd's internal state for debugging and diagnostic purposes. The syslog(3C) logging levels map as follows:

Error - Error messages
Warning - Client-initiated operations
Notice - Sleep proxy operations
Info - Informational messages

By default, only log level Error is logged.

A SIGUSR1 signal toggles additional logging, with Warning and Notice enabled by default:

% sudo pkill -USR1 mdnsd

A SIGUSR2 signal toggles packet logging:

% sudo pkill -USR2 mdnsd

A SIGINFO signal will dump a snapshot summary of the internal state:

% sudo pkill -INFO mdnsd

/usr/lib/inet/mdnsd

For information on Multicast DNS, see http://www.multicastdns.org/

For information on DNS Service Discovery, see http://www.dns-sd.org/

For information on how to use the Multicast DNS and the DNS Service Discovery APIs on Mac OS X and other platforms, see http://developer.apple.com/bonjour/

For the source code to mdnsd, see http://developer.apple.com/darwin/projects/bonjour/

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dns-sd(8)

The mdnsd service is managed by the service management facility, smf(7), under the service identifier:

svc:/network/dns/multicast:default

Administrative actions on this service, such as enabling, disabling, or requesting restart, can be performed using svcadm(8). The service's status can be queried using the svcs(1) command.

January 28, 2016 illumos