Is it possible your network disables multicast? On a typical home network I've never really had any issues with mDNS. It works great on Mac and I've got it run

Is it possible your network disables multicast? On a typical home network I've never really had any issues with mDNS. It works great on Mac and I've got it running fine on various bsd's and linux. I found mdnsd worked surprisingly well on FreeBSD, and took less configuration that Avahi. I will admit that windows doesn't seem to play that well with it. I'm curious what you tried that didn't work.