I am looking at different things that are installed in ipfire, one particular module that I see isn’t really nessisary for a routerOS and that is Avahi.
So why is Avahi installed and what purpose does it really have in ipfire?
What do you mean when you write routerOS? 
Avahi is not an add-on installed by default on a new IPFire installation.
Do you have read the following pages?
Regards
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This is an os for the intention of using the computer as a router.
Cups isn’t required unless the printer doesn’t have a print imaging driver, which the ones that fully support Linux do. Since I use HP printers, I use HPLIP instead of cups on my Linux computers.
Avahi is not needed for Samba. The only networking module that is used in Samba is dbus to mount the network file system. Netbios is depreciated, and since there is already an instance of bind9, you would use that instead and configure it in the hostnames.
I was looking at the stuff you can install, and I would remove all three from the distribution, but yes, I wouldn’t install them on the ipfire instance.
don’t blame Others if you are installing some Add-Ons which brings avahi on your System
There is no avahi to be found on my system either
Avahi not installed here either. If it’s installed on your system, it’s either a dependency to something else you installed, or you inadvertently installed it.
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In my system Avahi was brought in by cups.
Now, after cups was removed by the developers, Avahi was left behind.
I had to manually remove avahi…
I hope it helps
I was just noticing its in the software list and wondered why because its not needed.
Cups and samba don’t really need Avahi
Cups, you exclude it at compiling, in samba, multicast dns register = no is invoked in the smb.conf
Because the server has a name server on it, there really is no need. Even though I wouldn’t want to run either on the IPFire server.
In my setup, that is definitely true: my ipfire sits in a Layer 2 domain with several access points that perform NAT and all clients are behind those APs so there is no way multicast works.
So neither Samba or CUPS clients can benefit from multicast feature of AVAHI: my clients show no neighbors because those APs are also performing client isolation…
But, after removing AVAHI from my samba system the smb service failed to start so I had to put it back…
well you have to tell it not to use broadcasting and Avahi is disabled since they brought in the version with Avahi instead of building it without it.
under global, insert:
multicast dns register = no
AVAHI_DISABLE=true
NETBIOS_DISABLE=true
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I have added above 3 lines in /var/ipfire/samba/smb.conf under [global] section (copy paste from your post)
Then restarted Samba - all ok
Then removed Avahi and restarted samba: smbd is complaining on avahi shared libraries missing
I guess I can’t remove Avahi even after I disabled it in samba 
/etc/init.d/samba restart
Stopping smbd... [ OK ]
Stopping nmbd... [ OK ]
Stopping winbind... [ OK ]
Stopping Web Service Discovery Host Daemon... [ OK ]
Starting nmbd... [ OK ]
Starting smbd...
/usr/sbin/smbd: error while loading shared libraries: libavahi-client.so.3: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory [ FAIL ]
Starting winbind... [ OK ]
Starting Web Service Discovery Host Daemon... [ OK ]
/etc/init.d/samba status
nmbd is running with Process ID(s) 8023.
/usr/sbin/smbd is not running.
winbindd is running with Process ID(s) 8040 8037.
wsdd is running with Process ID(s) 8046.
late edit: these are smbd dependencies on avahi
ldd /usr/sbin/smbd | grep avahi
libavahi-client.so.3 => not found
libavahi-common.so.3 => not found
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samba on IPFire is built with avahi enabled. This means that it requires the avahi libraries.
So you can stop samba advertising the shares but you can’t uninstall avahi as samba is linked to the libraries.
With the share advertising disabled in the conf file then you will not be able to find any shares with your file manager on Linux or MacOS. You will need to know the share details and have to manually mount the share yourself on each of the PC’s wanting access on the green or blue subnets.
If you don’t want to use samba shares from IPFire at all then uninstall samba and all its dependencies.
If you are using windows then the shares are advertised using wsdd which is a samba dependency to provide the avahi equivalent for windows.
If you want to have samba but don’t want to have avahi installed then you cam always build your own samba addon with avahi disabled instead of enabled. (make sure you uninstall the standard IPFire samba addon and its dependencies first.
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In my case (all clients are in different network behind NAT and each client is isolated from the others) there is no value added for any of “advertising” services: avahi or wsdd.
Therefore I am trying to get rid of these add-ons.
Thank you @bonnietwin - I will disable as much as I can the advertising add-ons but leave them installed - as I am not trained enough to compile samba w/o them.
I’ll have to post a question about that to the author of Samba on his github site. Because he baked those options in the code. You might just need the files on the drive, but have the service disabled.