Up until today, I’ve only used my Ubuntu MacBook Air. My home network is mostly Apple products, so service discovery is built in. I want to enable and advertise the SSH service on the Air too.

First, I need to enable ssh. No big whoop:

air$ sudo apt-get install openssh-server
air$ sudo systemctl enable ssh
air$ sudo systemctl start ssh
air$ sudo systemctl status ssh

Now I can ssh into the machine as air.local. I set up SSH keys and so on. But, I don’t see it advertised. That’s something under the purview of avahi. That’s not an easy thing to casually use. I can publish the service during a session:

air$ sudo avahi-publish -s `hostname` _ssh._tcp 22 "SSH Remote Terminal"

And I can see it when I run dns-sd on my macOS machine. Start dns-sd first because it will sit there to watch the network for advertisements and output new ones as they come in:

macbookpro$ dns-sd -B _ssh._tcp .
Browsing for _ssh._tcp
DATE: ---Sat 11 Jan 2020---
15:07:21.564  ...STARTING...
Timestamp     A/R    Flags  if Domain  Service Type  Instance Name
15:07:21.757  Add        3   1 local.  _ssh._tcp.     macbookpro
15:07:21.757  Add        2   5 local.  _ssh._tcp.     macbookpro
15:07:22.293  Add        2   5 local.  _ssh._tcp.     macpro
15:07:22.543  Add        2   5 local.  _ssh._tcp.     air

To make it persistent, I can copy an example service from the examples to the live services directory:

air$ sudo cp /usr/share/doc/avahi-daemon/examples/ssh.service /etc/avahi/services/.

Once all that is setup, I make an entry in ~/.ssh/config on any remote machine where I want to start. I don’t want to type the entire air.local so I give it a short name with Host:

# ~/.ssh/config
Host air
Hostname air.local
User brian
IdentityFile /Users/brian/.ssh/id_rsa