[CentOS] Is avahi essential?

John R Pierce wrote:

> its part of multimedia home network plug and play, I believe...  lets
> media boxes find media servers, and such.    if you were to serve up
> streaming media on a home network, it would be a useful thing to have.
> otherwise?   meh.

Could you give a concrete example of such a setup, please?

I must admit I'm rather confused by UPnP.
Is it intended for devices that don't have an IP address?
Or how does it fit in with dhcpd?

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