Fixing ESP8266mDNS MDNS.queryService() Crashes

I ran into some very frustrating, mysterious errors wile trying to use MDNS.queryService()  in the ESP8266 Arduino SDK. What should have been a simple call to attempt to resolve an mDNS name turned into an exception and stack dump.

Code that looked like this:

Serial.println("About to call MDNS.queryService()");

  int n = MDNS.queryService(HOMEBUS_DEFAULT_NAME, "tcp");
  Serial.printf(" got %d mDNS results\n", n);

  for(int i = 0; i < n; i++) {
    if(MDNS.hostname(i) == HOMEBUS_DEFAULT_NAME) {
      ip[0] = MDNS.IP(i)[0];
      ip[1] = MDNS.IP(i)[1];
      ip[2] = MDNS.IP(i)[2];
      ip[3] = MDNS.IP(i)[3];
    }
  }

led to this:

About to call MDNS.queryService()

Exception (28):
epc1=0x40209972 epc2=0x00000000 epc3=0x00000000 excvaddr=0x00000000 depc=0x00000000

ctx: cont
sp: 3fff0ea0 end: 3fff1130 offset: 01a0

>>>stack>>>
3fff1040:  4020996b 3ffeff48 00000001 401068a0
3fff1050:  6d6f485f 73754265 3fff1000 402098c6
3fff1060:  3fff0044 00000001 3ffe909e 7101000a
3fff1070:  00ffffff 0101000a 61636f6c 745f006c
3fff1080:  3f007063 00000012 00000005 00000004
3fff1090:  00000008 005f0000 3fff0044 4020e9fd
3fff10a0:  3fff1050 00000001 3fff0044 4020ebb0
3fff10b0:  40201506 00001388 3fff0044 3fff0104
3fff10c0:  3ffe8adf 00001388 3fff0044 4020ad67
3fff10d0:  3ffe8adf 3ffeff30 3fff0044 40207bbf
3fff10e0:  40106de0 7101000a 00000000 feefeffe
3fff10f0:  feefeffe feefeffe feefeffe feefeffe
3fff1100:  feefeffe feefeffe feefeffe 3fff0104
3fff1110:  3fffdad0 00000000 3fff00fc 4020fd2c
3fff1120:  feefeffe feefeffe 3fff0110 40100700
<<<stack<<<

 ets Jan  8 2013,rst cause:2, boot mode:(1,6)


 ets Jan  8 2013,rst cause:4, boot mode:(1,6)

wdt reset

Turned out there’s a simple solution to this problem.

I’d forgotten to call MDNS.begin()  first. This prepares the MDNS class for further calls, and the class isn’t written to detect the fact that begin()  wasn’t called already. Once I made sure to call MDNS.begin() before calling MDNS.queryService() the problem went away and the code worked properly.