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Avahi is a system which facilitates service discovery on a local network. This means that you can plug your laptop or computer into a network and instantly be able to view other people who you can chat with, find printers to print to or find files being shared. This kind of technology is already found in Apple MacOS X (branded Rendezvous, Bonjour and sometimes Zeroconf) and is very convenient. Avahi is mainly based on Lennart Poettering's flexmdns mDNS implementation for Linux which has been discontinued in favour of Avahi.

ddclient is a client for updating dynamic DNS entries for accounts on a number of dynamic DNS providers, including Dynamic DNS Network Services' free DNS service. Many different routers are supported. Supported features include: operating as a daemon, manual and automatic updates, static and dynamic updates, optimized updates for multiple addresses, MX, wildcards, abuse avoidance, retrying failed updates, and sending update status to syslog and through e-mail.

Dnsmasq is a lightweight, easy to configure DNS forwarder and DHCP server. It is designed to provide DNS and, optionally, DHCP, to a small network. It can serve the names of local machines which are not in the global DNS. The DHCP server integrates with the DNS server and allows machines with DHCP-allocated addresses to appear in the DNS with names configured either in each host or in a central configuration file. Dnsmasq supports static and dynamic DHCP leases and BOOTP for network booting of diskless machines. Dnsmasq is targeted at home networks using NAT and connected to the internet via a modem, cable-modem or ADSL connection but would be a good choice for any small network where low resource use and ease of configuration are important.

The PowerDNS Nameserver is a modern, advanced and high performance authoritative-only nameserver. It is written from scratch and conforms to all relevant DNS standards documents. Furthermore, PowerDNS interfaces with almost any database, MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL and many other.

pdnsd is a Proxy DNS server for Linux and FreeBSD that is designed to cope with unreacheable nameservers (e.g. because the dial-in link is not up) in a graceful manner to prevent DNS-dependent applications like Netscape from hanging. It has a permanent disk cache and supports parallel query and a wide variety of link uptests. It also has the ability to serve some local records.