Thanks to all for quick responses.
Alex' suggestion of hostname.local works well for sshfs, and makes a lot of sense. I'll use that. My local static IP was
around since early 2000s on whatever "server" I set up on my LAN to try out different things and share files. Some
scripts will need changing, but in a very minor way. I'll have to check out what address to use for apache or other
httpd server, but I only need that once a year or so.
His other comments reflect what I've been finding, namely, multiple approaches in different distros rather tripping all
over each other. I was assuming an approach that clearly has gone away. However, it looks like some of the control GUI
stuff is out of date, so just confusing everything.
Best, JN