1. Home
2. CrossOver troubleshooting documentation
3. Missing or broken libnss_mdns.so.2 library

Missing or broken libnss_mdns.so.2 library

Description

This library is only needed if /etc/nsswitch.conf specifies 'mdns4' or 'mdns4_minimal' on the 'hosts' line. This is only known to be the case on Debian and Ubuntu systems.

When this library is needed, it is used to resolve host names; so its absence will break most network and Internet applications.

Resolution

On CrossOver 17 and greater, the simplest solution to fix this issue is to run:
/path/to/cxoffice/bin/cxfix missinglibnss_mdns missinglibnss_mdns.amd64
Or add --show-all to see how CrossOver would fix it on your platform and others.

Alternatively you may try one of the commands below.

• For 32-bit Windows applications
  

32-bit Arch Linux : pacman -Syu nss-mdns

64-bit Arch Linux (1) : pacman -Syu lib32-nss-mdns

32-bit Debian >= 7 : apt-get install libnss-mdns

64-bit Debian >= 7 (2) : apt-get install lib32nss-mdns

Debian >= 8 : apt-get install libnss-mdns:i386

32-bit Fedora : yum install nss-mdns

64-bit Fedora : yum install nss-mdns.i686 nss-mdns.x86_64

32-bit openSUSE : zypper install nss-mdns

64-bit openSUSE : zypper install nss-mdns-32bit

• For 64-bit Windows applications
  

Arch Linux : pacman -Syu nss-mdns

Debian >= 7 : apt-get install libnss-mdns:amd64

Fedora : yum install nss-mdns.x86_64

openSUSE >= 11.2 : zypper install nss-mdns

Notes:

• cxfix --show-all may have more up-to-date fixes.
  
• The commands usually also apply to newer versions of the distributions above as well as derived distributions. So for instance a fix for Debian 7 may still be valid for the latest Debian Testing and is typically also applicable to Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Deepin and Pop! OS. Similarly a fix for Fedora likely also works on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS, etc.
  
• (1) : The lib32-nss-mdns package is available from the standard multilib Manjaro repository. However Arch users will have to get it from an AUR repository.
  
• (2) : Note that on Debian 7 and Ubuntu <= 14.04 attempting to use libnss-mdns:i386 will cause the package manager to try replacing the 64-bit libraries with the 32-bit ones, thus breaking 64-bit Linux applications.
  

Mageia

Mageia 2 and 3 users running the 64-bit version will need to manually download the nss-mdns library and install it via the rpm:

Mageia 3
wget ftp://rpmfind.net/linux/mageia/distrib/3/i586/media/core/release/nss_mdns-0.10-10.mga3.i586.rpm rpm -ihv nss_mdns-0.10-10.mga3.i586.rpm

Mageia 2
wget ftp://rpmfind.net/linux/mageia/distrib/2/i586/media/core/release/nss_mdns-0.10-9.mga1.i586.rpm rpm -ihv nss_mdns-0.10-9.mga1.i586.rpm
The relevant bug report is available here.

With thanks to Dylan Myers for this tip