oranki

mDNS refers to multicast DNS (.local), while similar you should not mix it up with Tailscale’s MagicDNS, which is entirely a Tailscale thing, dependent on their APIs.

mDNS also seems to be what you’re after too. For the hostname-only resolution to work, you need to have Avahi or equivalent mDNS daemon running on the hosts, and add .local to the search domains. Setting search domains can be done manually on each host or via DHCP network-wide.

With mDNS and .local in the search domains, when you try e.g. http://myhost/ in the browser, the browser first tries myhost, then adds each search domain, e.g. myhost.local. Since .local is reserved for mDNS, querying it results in an mDNS query in your network, and if there’s a device with a matching name, it will respond with it’s IP address.

Note that if you have Tailscale and MagicDNS active, your tailnet’s domain will (or should) be the first one on the search domains list, and your DNS server is set to 100.100.100.100, which is a dummy address on which the tailscale daemon runs the internal DNS server for Tailscale, including MagicDNS.

Multicast DNS / Avahi is a little bit error prone in my experience, but when nothing goes wrong, this would give you what you’re looking for.

There are other options, like your router automatically registering DNS entries for DHCP hosts, or running a separate DNS server anf manually adding records for the hosts you need this for.

If it’s worth doing, it’s worth overdoing!

No, I haven’t tried OC. Lot of people still prefer it over NC. I think both have come quite a long way since then.

I wouldn’t say Nextcloud is hard to maintain, even less so if you keep the number of apps to a minimum. The initial setup may require some work, but small instances are mostly plug and play.

Note that I’ve never used AIO. If going for containers, the community images are better, despite AIO advertised as the official method. I recommend using Podman, check out

https://github.com/0ranki/nextcloud-previews

Also a blog post: https://oranki.net/posts/2025-01-02-self-hosting-my-way5-nextcloud/

Nextcloud, despite you’re not considering it. You can disable or not install the apps you don’t need, like Calendar, Contacts, Photos, Dashboard, Activity, etc.

There’s also a fork of Filebrowser, called Filebrowser Quantum, which I’ve been interested in, though haven’t tried yet: https://github.com/gtsteffaniak/filebrowser

The Universal Blue people emphasize containerized stuff a little too much. It’s perfectly possible to add non-flatpak software to ostree distros, it just slows update processing down a little bit.

Since abraunegg onedrive is available as an RPM, you can just layer it on top of Bazzite; download the rpm and and then rpm-ostree install ./onedrive.rpm

If the RPM works on Fedora it will work in ostree distros too. Besides, if it foesn’t work, you can just rpm-ostree rollback and it’s like you never installed it, apart from things in your $HOME like config files.

The recommendation is to avoid layering wherever possible, not that you can’t do it. Many apps are still a bit wonky as flatpaks, even if available.