Avahi not honoring its own /etc/avahi/hosts on the same machine

# scenario I want to use a mostly relatively light-weight way of associating IP addresses with hostnames. For this, I've installed Avahi and mdns/nss on my Fedora distro. I've like to use the pseudo-tld ".o" as a local domain, and not the default ".local". In /etc/nsswitch.conf I've made sure that mdns4 is set:

hosts:      files myhostname mdns4 [NOTFOUND=return] resolve [!UNAVAIL=return] dns

In /etc/avahi/avahi-daemon.conf I changed one line and left everything unchaged:

domain-name=o

As my host name is desk this should make the domain desk.o available. That's my understanding, anyway. Finally, in /etc/avahi/hosts, I've set one IP-hostname relation:

192.168.0.1 router.o

# expected behavior Assuming my machine's name is desk, I'd expect the domain desk.o to be available. Furthermore, I have machines in my network, which are unable to have their own Avahi running on them, so I'd use /etc/avahi/hosts to annouce those IP addresses, etc. One reason being, I have a pretty old network printer, which simply can't run Avahi, and I just have to use either the IP or something like Avahi (or just an entry in /etc/hosts). So with the hosts file above, I'd expect router.o to be resolved to 192.168.0.1, etc. # observed behavior I've restarted Avahi after making any changes (systemctl restart avahi-daemon.service), but the way thing work is a little strange: When running getent hosts desk.local I get this:

2a02:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:8878:583d desk.local
fe80::f990:519a:4ba5:9f22 desk.local

*(first IP partially obfuscated. Where there's an x, there were just hex digits)* I'm fine with this (mostly), I wouldn't expect to desk.local be still available, but I'm assuming it's some sort of default that I can't get rid of (for now). When running getent hosts desk.o I get:

127.0.0.1       desk.o

This is fine, as long as it's only on this machine, but it's a little odd to me, the FQDN hostname resolved to this. When running getent hosts router.o I get nothing. Just no output. # questions So, apparently Avahi is ignoring /etc/avahi/hosts? I've restarted Avahi after making changes to that file, so I was assuming it'd be re-read. Is Avahi not "publishing" the set hostnames to itself? How to make Avahi and my system behave as I'd expect? Or am I having a fundamental thinking error here? ---- Ideally, an Avahi-hostname file would be somewhere in my $HOME, such that I don't have to adjust a system-wide hostname file for Avahi, if that makes sense. If that won't work, it's fine, since that'd go against the way hostname resolution works in principle, I suppose. What kinda surprised me a little, is that desk.o is getting resolved (not as I'd expect it, really), but at least it resolves to *something* so it's at least partially working.