How use Remote Desktop Address when desktop sharing on Ubuntu 22.04
At home I sometimes connect to a workstation from my laptop (both are at home). To connect to the server (i.e. the workstation) I use its internal IP in Remmina on my laptop. As the following image shows, Ubuntu on the server gives a Device Name and a Remote Desktop Address for establishing a connection. But I haven’t been able to use them at all. Should I set up some sort of DNS first? If I’m not mistaken, on the router device at home I can associate any name with any internal IP address. So why has Ubuntu given these names?
You should be able to use ms-rd://kant.local wherever you had been using the internal IP for Remmina.
kant is your hostname as seen in the bash prompt and in hostnamectl. .local is just a suffix to tell the system to resolve the query using mDNS. You do not need to set up any DNS manually. mDNS queries are not sent to the internet, but broadcast to all computers connected to the same router, and the one with that name responds. Your router’s name feature is probably something that intercepts regular DNS if it’s not .local, and just another mDNS server if it is. All this is usually handled by avahi-daemon, so make sure you didn’t disable anything.
To test mDNS, run avahi-resolve --name kant.local on the client. .local mDNS addresses are resolved system-wide. They are accepted everywhere a regular DNS address is, and those are usually accepted everywhere an IP is. You can also debug the mDNS name like any other domain name like with ping kant.local and curl kant.local.