I just came across this post (which is more than a year old), and I donât have the time to research if that has been resolved in the meanwhile, so my reply may be completely out of scope. If so, feel free to remove it as unnecessary noise and delete or mute or close it or whatever options there are for the site admins.
However, Iâd like to quickly point out, that youâd have a very good solution to âmake it super easy to connect to a box without knowing its IP addressâ if you researched the topics of âZeroConfâ, âBonjourâ, or the Linux implementation of both âAvahiâ, which are documented in official RFCs: see the DNS-SD/rfc6763 (DNS Service Discovery) and mDNS/rfc6762 (Multicast DNS) documents published by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).
Also, my feature request from 18 months ago, if implemented, would include âsuper easy connections to a box without knowing its IP addressâ.
We use zeroconf/bonjour in the Nextcloud box already. But this does not work on the wider internet, nor does it ALWAYS work. Eg it is not supported on any Windows version other than Windows 10.
Right now, though, our Box advertises itself on the network as ânextcloud.localâ, which works in most situations.
The bigger problem is opening a port in the firewall
ZeroConf originally wasnât designed to work on the wider internet. However, some later extensions (called Wide Area Bonjour) do add support for this. So this CAN also work on the wider internet. However, this (of course) requires to configure a DNS server appropriately:
