Hosts on a local network can use mDNS to “self-publish” DNS names for other hosts to find them quickly and easily. Windows XP can use Apples "Bonjour" package, Macs come with the funcitionality built-in and many popular Linux distros use Avahi to provide the functionality.

Sometimes on the Linux host the local firewall can get in the way of Avahi working correctly.

Here's the magic:

iptables -A INPUT -p udp —-dst 224.0.0.251 —-dport 5353 -j ACCEPT

You'll have to replace the tables with whatever you have on your local system, but the basic logic should flow.

mDNS is a multicast protocol that runs on 224.0.0.251 port 5353, so your local mDNS client/server (in our case, Avahi) needs to be able to talk out to the multicast channel.