[CentOS] Is avahi essential?

Rilindo Foster wrote:

>> So I looked up avahi on the web, but as far as I could see
>> it is not doing anything essential;
>> so I was wondering if stopping avahi-daemon would have any bad effect?

> Avahi is a mdns daemon. You can safely disable it in most cases.

But what applications use mdns?

As far as I can see, it is some sort of rival to dhcpd.
Is it only used within local LANs?
Is it used, for example, by CUPS to identify printers?
When, if ever, would it be used in a home network?

-- 
Timothy Murphy  
e-mail: gayleard /at/ eircom.net
tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366
s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College Dublin