[CentOS] Is avahi essential?

Timothy Murphy wrote:
> William Warren wrote:
>
>>>> 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?
>>>
>> http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=mdns
>> <http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=mdns>
>
> I had looked up mdns on google, which is what you seem to be suggesting.
> But it did not give me an answer to my query above.
> Which URL did you think answered this?

maybe this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_configuration_networking