Hi first of all I should mention that this is my first post so please tell me if I'm making any mistakes.

I'm currently trying out an alpine linux virtual machine to possibly learn a little more about it and experiment with the environment it provides. Since It's a minimal os there is no graphical output so I either have to use the console or ssh to it. However, when using ssh I have to find the local ip address that is assigned to it every time which seems to be set by virt-manager or qemu.

My question is can I somehow use the hostname of vm (which is consistent) to ssh to it? After searching a little I think what I'm looking for is a service called avahi that provides something called mdns. I don't have any experience with networking so I just installed the service without any configuration but it didn't work and after some more searching I realized that it's because alpine uses musl c library and musl doesn't implement mdns so it doesn't work. since the avahi package is in alpine repos I'm pretty sure there must be a way to get it to work but I haven't found any solutions to it.

Sorry if it appears that this problem strays from networking. My original question remains the same, using hostname instead of ip address to ssh to a vm so if there is any solution that doesn't involve the above method that would also be awesome.

The easy way:
1) Connect to your Linux machine through console. It does not request IP address.
2) Find out the new IP address of Linux machine
3) SSH in.

Configure the IP address of the vm to be static.
Then update the hosts file on the connecting computer
(Figuring out how to do that will be a good learning experience)