Sure. Though I’m not an expert on mDNS or anything. It stands for multi cast DNS. In a normal scenario, when your PC tries to connect to a local resource at its hostname it will use a local DNS server (or its own cache). It’s like a phone book. I know who I’m looking for, I just need to look in the phone book and see what their IP is. With mDNS there is no server. You’ll have a service that will plan to respond at a particular .local hostname, so like jellyfin.local (this is just an example, I don’t know if it has mDNS) but that isn’t registered on a server. Instead when your PC wants to reach jellyfin it will send a multi-cast to the other local devices and say “ok, I’m looking for some guy named jellyfin.local, which one of y’all is that?” And the jellyfin server will respond and say “yo what up, this is my ip address”
So anyway, that only works with .local addresses. You could use .local with a regular dns server, but then you may run into a conflict. So that would be the benefit of reserving .internal
It’s for internal resources. You can really use whatever subdomain you want internally, but this decision would be to basically say to registrars, this TLD is reserved, we will never sell this TLD to anyone to use. That way you know that if you use it internally, there’s no way a whoopsie would happen where your DNS server finds a public record for this TLD.
I will provide a word of advice since you mentioned messiness. My original server was just one phyiscla host which I would install new stuff to. And then I started realizing that I would forget about stuff or that if I removed something later there may still be lingering related files or dependencies. Now I run all my apps in docker containers and use docker-compose for every single one. No more messiness or extra dependencies. If I try out an app and don’t like it, boom container deleted, end of story.
Extra benefit is that I have less to backup. I only need to backup the docker compose files themselves and whatever persistent volumes are mounted to each container.
I don’t have any answers to your questions, I would just like to mention that you can get complete images that do both of these things together. I use this one, but there apparently to be a bunch of different ones.
I encountered a similar issue with NFS a very long time ago. I had to set the option for each of my NFS exports to have a fsid and make sure the fsid is different between them.
So one folder has the option fsid=1
Second folder has fsid=2 and so on.
I hope this helps point you in the right direction.
I have been running OMV for years and it is super stable. I rarely have to go in there. It has a lot of functionality thought the UI. My biggest gripe is that all of permissions options/ACLs combined with normal Linux permissions can be kind of confusing.
Unraid is also super simple, but maybe a bit too simple for some people. I don’t use anything but the core functionality in either one of these products. If you’re on the fence, you can do an unraid trial for 30* days (30 days, but technically you can stay on the trial as long as your disk array does not have to be restarted)
Sure. Though I’m not an expert on mDNS or anything. It stands for multi cast DNS. In a normal scenario, when your PC tries to connect to a local resource at its hostname it will use a local DNS server (or its own cache). It’s like a phone book. I know who I’m looking for, I just need to look in the phone book and see what their IP is. With mDNS there is no server. You’ll have a service that will plan to respond at a particular .local hostname, so like jellyfin.local (this is just an example, I don’t know if it has mDNS) but that isn’t registered on a server. Instead when your PC wants to reach jellyfin it will send a multi-cast to the other local devices and say “ok, I’m looking for some guy named jellyfin.local, which one of y’all is that?” And the jellyfin server will respond and say “yo what up, this is my ip address”
So anyway, that only works with .local addresses. You could use .local with a regular dns server, but then you may run into a conflict. So that would be the benefit of reserving .internal