I have a stock /e/ FP3+ with an up to date OS for a while. Most of my home systems (volumio, kodi, etc) are available via mdns as .local hostnames. I cannot find out how to make the phone resolve such domains though. Until now I’ve only been using iPhones and they resolve everything oob, as do my linux pcs so I’m a bit lost here. Searching the web for /e/ mdns or Android .local resolution does not bring up many results other than “some apps do that on their own”. We have 2021 now, shouldn’t this sort of stuff come automatically with the OS? Is there something I can do to my device to make it resolve mdns?
I’m having trouble understanding how to use network scanner to achieve what I want. Can you elaborate?
My goal is to be able to reach ad-hoc .local domains from a browser tab so that I can then save them as WPAs on the home screen. Getting the IP won’t necessarily help me since I do not pin IPs on this network. This also doesn’t help me in the visitor case where I just want to tell them to visit jukebox.local for example.
I have tried the same as you in the past without success. It is nothing to do with /e/. As I understand it Android in 2021 still does not do mdns.
mdns scanner apps exist, but you cannot use .local urls in your browser.
Happy to be proven wrong if anyone knows of a way to do it.
EDIT
There is actually a workaround I have used in the past. If you have a linux server you can use dnsmasq as a caching DNS server and run a script to scan for .local addresses with avahi-browse, and then add the discovered addresses to dnsmasq’s static address table. Bit of a kludge but it worked last time I tried it. (Sorry I no longer have the script I used.)
Sorry, you are right Network Scanner was not a very good link to offer you!
I was only really giving you the keyword zeroconf.
On a different machine a search zeroconf + mDNS of a major player app store reveals a lot of hits. (On my phone all “possible leads” were obstructed by self-imposed blockers except that.)
I’ve found BonjourBrowser in F-Droid that sort of does what I wanted (bar the creating home screen entries) I know that there is a fork of it that allows to add the found web services as home screen links but I’m not clear whether its open source or not and how I could get it on my device. (Generally trying to only load Foss)
