# Do I need Avahi

## Clad in Sky

Hi,

on my last setup, for some reason or the other, I had avahi running, but even then didn't really know what it was doing - just got pulled in by some package as a dependency I guess.

Now I realized that on my current setup it isn't installed. I'm wondering if it is useful. For sharing files I can also use samba, so is there anything that makes Avahi/ zeroconf really necessary?

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## cach0rr0

I've personally kept it off of all of my systems, and as I have no real complaints thus far, I don't see any significant use for it.

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## Clad in Sky

Yeah, thanks, that's why I was wondering. I didn't even realize it wasn't there until a package I wanted to emerge had avahi as possible useflag. Guess I'll go without it, then.

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## wswartzendruber

I've liked it for automatically finding PulseAudio servers without any configuration, but that's it.

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