I can pull up cockpit by using the hostname in the web browsers url, but samba doesn’t point to the server by name. Only IP address pulls it up.
I don’t want to risk installing conflicting stuff but I’m not finding a lot of detail here. Does fedora have something for this included? Does it use avahi? Systemd-resolved? Smoke signals?
Your router is doing that, not Fedora Server.
The router does not handle mdns discovery. That’s a Linux service. The router can answer questions from other clients but if has to be given the answer by the host in the first place. That’s what systemd-resolved and avahi do.
Doesn’t matter. Your machine going to another is not simply due to mdns running. In fact, I doubt that’s a default package selection in Fedora Server for security reasons, but I could be wrong.
Run
dig [whateverhostname]from your machine, and then check/etc/systemd/resolved.confon the server and see if something with MulticastDNS is enabled. Don’t see why that would ever exist as a default.